"Moira," he said.
"Hi, Fritz. Can I talk to you?"
He looked at her for a moment, then went back to shoveling. "Talk," he said. "I'm listening. Snow doesn't wait."
So she stood on the part of the walk he had already cleared and told him, while he shoveled. She told him what she had done since September, all of it, the man in the bus shelter and the motel boys and the pie, and she told him what Abe had told Ayanna, and what Ayanna had told her, and the number on the legal pad. She had rehearsed it in the car and none of the rehearsal survived. It came out in the wrong order, and her voice shook on Thursday, and at the end she said, "I didn't know. I swear to God, Fritz, I didn't know it was coming out of you," and then she stopped, because it sounded like an excuse even to her.
Fritz finished the last stretch of walk to the curb. Then he stood the shovel against the fence and pulled off his gloves, one finger at a time, and looked at her.
"I knew you were giving food," he said.
Moira stared at him.
"The remakes," he said. "Wrong temp. They come back to my pit. Plate comes back to me, Moira, I see it. Wrong temp pot pie, it should come back full, maybe one bite, the guest says too cold, they send it. Your wrong temps come back clean. Wiped with bread. A little boy's crayon on the placemat." He shrugged with his good shoulder. "Six years I wash plates. A plate tells you everything. I knew in September."
"You never said anything."
"Why I say something? I'm happy. I think, good, the little boys from the motel eat. I think, Moira has a good heart." He folded the gloves together and put them in his coat pocket. "I didn't know about Thursday. That, I didn't know. I believed Abe. Slow winter."
They stood there in the cold. Down the block a dog was barking at nothing, steadily, the way dogs do in the snow.
"I'm so sorry," Moira said.
"Yes." He nodded, accepting it, not waving it off. "I believe you. You didn't know. But listen to me, because I'm only going to say it one time." He held up one finger, the way she imagined he might have held it up to his granddaughter once, over a math book at a kitchen table. "You were kind with my Thursday. You didn't ask me. If you asked me, Fritz, the little boys from the motel are hungry, I want to feed them, can you give some of your Thursday?