"I understand."
She reached across and pushed his hair off his forehead. Then she picked up a pen and signed Rosie's slip, Darlene M. Dunn, with the loop on the D, the real one, and she counted out four dollars in quarters into an envelope, and she licked it and sealed it and wrote Rosie D.—Buhl on the front in pencil.
"Oh," she said. "Aunt Bev called. She's sending a box. Coats. Some of Kevin's things he grew out of, for you, and a snowsuit for Rosie. It's coming on the bus Saturday, the package express. Can you go down to the station and pick it up? I've got the Coin-Op till four."
"Sure."
"It'll be heavy. Take the bus down, at least. Don't walk the whole way carrying it."
"Okay."
"There's a claim slip." She dug in her purse and found it, a yellow carbon with GREYHOUND across the top and a number written in. She slid it across the table to him. Then she held on to it a second when he took it, so they were both holding it. "Downtown station's a zoo on Saturdays. You stay where people are. You don't talk to anybody weird."
"I know."
"I know you know." She let go of the slip. She looked at it in his hand for a second with an expression he didn't understand, a kind of faraway look, like someone listening to a song from another room. "I haven't been in that station in years," she said, mostly to herself.
"Since when?"
She blinked and was back. "Since forever. Since before you. Go do your homework."
* * *
That night he lay in the bottom bunk and listened to Rosie breathing above him and thought about magnanimous. A great soul. He thought about Mr. Iannelli, and about kings, and about the man in the Duquesne Light truck, who was probably a perfectly nice man, who probably had kids, who would get out of his truck with a clipboard and go around to the side of the building where the meters were. He thought about what it would be like in the apartment with no lights in November. You could use candles. People used candles for a thousand years. He thought about the forty-one dollars in the Sucrets tin, and moved his lips without meaning to, and made himself stop.
He thought about his name.