He lowered his hand and looked at the pie, and then at her, and something happened to his face that she had seen happen to a great many teenage boys over the years, when they had been braced for a blow that did not come.
He ate the pie. She drank her coffee. And for the next hour, because she was a teacher and could not help herself, she asked him questions. Where he had grown up. What his mother was like. What he wanted to do now. He told her he had taken a job selling appliances at a store in Skokie, for a third of what he had made before, and that he was putting the condo up for sale. He told her he had started volunteering on Saturday mornings at a literacy program on the West Side, because Ruth Kessler had given him the number, and because he did not know what else to do with himself, and because a woman named Mrs. Okonjo who ran it had looked at him on the first day and said, You're the one from the video, aren't you, and then handed him a box of picture books and told him to get to work.
"Is it helping?" Vivian asked.
"I don't know," Grant said honestly. "I don't know if it's supposed to help me. I think it's supposed to help the kids."
Vivian smiled for the first time.
"Now you're learning something," she said.
When they left, he held the door for her. She noticed that he did it without thinking, and that he looked her in the face when he did it, and she let herself notice that, too. On the sidewalk he started to say something else, another apology, she could see it forming, and she held up her hand.
"That's enough, Mr. Mercer. You've said it. Go home. Go sell somebody a refrigerator. Go read to those children on Saturday. And the next time somebody walks into a room where you are, look at them for longer than half a second. That's all. That's the whole lesson."
"Yes, ma'am," said Grant Mercer, and she watched him walk to the bus stop on Forty-seventh Street, a tall young man in a gray T-shirt with his hands in his pockets, until the bus came and took him away.
She went back to Whitcomb and Hale on the second Thursday in September.
She went because Ruth Kessler asked her to come, and because Denise said, Mama, it's your money and your necklace and that's your street as much as anybody's, and because Raymond had written don't you dare buy anything sensible, and she had not yet done what he asked. She wore her good navy dress again, and the pearl earrings. She did it on purpose this time.
The doorman opened the heavy glass door for her before she reached it. Inside it was cool and quiet and smelled of lilies, and the piano was playing something soft, and Marcus Bell was standing by the door in his gray suit. When he saw her, he smiled, a big slow smile, and said, "Good morning, Mrs. Reed. Welcome back," and she found that her eyes stung.