"Don't be sorry. Be somewhere else with the broom."
At five, Mrs. Halloran came in for her husband's boots, and she was short a quarter on the ticket, and she stood at the counter going through her coin purse with her face getting redder and redder. Cal, behind her, wiping the glass, had a quarter in his pocket from the bus fare he hadn't needed that morning. He put it on the counter beside her hand while she was still digging, very quietly, the way you'd set down a cup.
Mr. Iannelli looked at the quarter and then at Cal and didn't say anything. He just rang it up.
When Mrs. Halloran had gone, he said, "You know what that was?"
"What?"
"That was a quarter." He went back to his vise. "Your mother raised you right. Don't let anybody tell you different. Now get out of here, it's getting dark."
* * *
His mother was up when he got home, sitting at the kitchen table in her robe with her hair down, which was a thing he almost never saw. The pink envelope was out from under the canister. Next to it was Rosie's permission slip and next to that was her purse, open, and next to that was a small pile of bills and change that she'd been arranging and rearranging, he could tell, because the quarters were in stacks of four.
Rosie was in the front room watching Happy Days reruns on the little black-and-white with the coat hanger for an antenna.
"Hey," his mother said.
"Hey."
He put the knapsack on its nail. He didn't sit down. He went to the sink and got a glass of water he didn't want.
"Mr. Iannelli says hi," he said.
"Mr. Iannelli's a good man."