She turned and looked at me then, the way she had at the counter — all the way. "Thank you," she said. "For my life. I never got to say it to the right person."
I didn't trust my voice. I nodded. She reached over and took my right hand out of my coat pocket and turned it palm up and looked at the scar for a long moment, the long pale line with its ladder of stitch marks, and then she put her own palm against it, flat, the way I'd once put mine against her window, and held it there. Then she let go, and walked back across the hotel lot to her car, a little gray Honda, and sat in it a while before she started it. I watched her pull out. She took the surface streets.
On Monday morning I took the number 46 bus in from Westerville. I was wearing my camel coat and my oatmeal slacks and my tan flats. And around my neck I was wearing a scarf I'd bought on Sunday afternoon at the Kohl's on Sunbury Road, after standing in front of the rack for most of an hour with my mother's voice in my ear — a long, soft wool scarf, the deep, plain red of a stop sign, the color of a coat that gets put on a poster.
I felt it the whole ride, like a hand at my throat. Twice I nearly took it off and put it in my bag. I didn't.
In the lobby I walked past the display case with its empty rectangle on the felt, and a man from the mailroom I'd nodded to for eleven years said, "Morning, Etta. Nice scarf," and I said, "Thank you," and kept walking. I took the stairs. Through the window in the door on three, I could see straight across the cafeteria annex, where the early people get their coffee, and at a table by the far wall, Derek and Talia were sitting across from each other, not touching, two cups between them, talking. He was leaning forward. She was listening, with her chin up. I couldn't see her left hand from there. I couldn't tell whether she was wearing the ring.
I could have gone closer to find out. I stood with my hand on the door a moment, thinking about it, with the red scarf warm around my neck and anyone at all able to look up and see me there.
Then I went to my desk, and sat down with my back to the wall, and unfolded my hands, and started the day's invoices.