Grant did not answer for a long time. When he finally did, he did not look at her.
"No," he said. "No, ma'am. You didn't."
"Thank you," said Vivian Reed. "That's the first honest thing you've said to me today."
She turned away from him then and walked to the window and stood looking out at the green water of the river with her back to the room, and Ruth saw her shoulders rise and fall once, very slowly, like someone setting down something heavy.
"Grant," Ruth said quietly. "Go to my office and wait for me there. Don't go back on the floor. Don't talk to anyone. Marcus, would you walk with him, please."
Grant hesitated in the doorway. He looked at Vivian's back as if he wanted to say something, and Ruth thought for a moment he might. But he only said, "I'm sorry," to no one in particular, too quietly for anyone to be sure they had heard it, and went out. Marcus followed him and closed the door.
Ruth and Vivian were alone in the small room with the river outside.
"I don't know what to say to you," Ruth said finally. "I have a whole list of things I'm supposed to say in situations like this. Corporate gives it to us. I've read it. None of it is any good."
"Then don't say it," said Vivian without turning around.
"All right." Ruth sat down, slowly, in one of the upholstered chairs. She was sixty-three, and her feet hurt, and she felt every year of it. "Then I'll tell you something instead, and you can do what you like with it. I started selling jewelry in 1981, at Marshall Field's on State Street. I was nineteen. My father was a butcher in Bridgeport and I was the first girl in my family who ever wore a suit to work. On my first day, my floor manager took me aside and taught me how to watch people. He didn't call it anything. He just said, some customers you greet, and some customers you keep an eye on. And he showed me which ones were which." She looked down at her hands. "I learned it. I was good at it. I was nineteen and I wanted to keep that job more than I've ever wanted anything. And one Saturday afternoon a woman came in with her daughter, a little girl about ten, in a yellow dress with a bow in her hair. They were Black. And I followed them. All around the counter, the whole time they were there. I didn't say anything. I didn't have to. And when they left, the little girl looked back at me over her shoulder, and I will never in my life forget the look on her face. She knew exactly what I'd been doing. She was ten years old and she already knew."
Vivian turned around.
"I've spent forty years trying to unlearn what that man taught me in one afternoon," Ruth said. "I thought I'd done a decent job of it. I thought I'd built a store where nobody would ever do that to anybody. And this morning I stood at that railing and watched one of my best salesmen do it to you in front of half my floor. So I don't have a list. I just have that. I'm sorry. I am so sorry, Mrs. Reed."