Maybe I say yes. Maybe I give you some. I know hungry. I was hungry in Gonaïves when I was a boy, you don't know what hungry is. Maybe I give you a lot. But you don't ask. You took it, and you gave it, and you felt good, and I didn't even get to feel good, because I didn't know I was giving." He lowered the finger. "That's not a kind thing, Moira. That's half a kind thing."
Moira's eyes were burning. She did not wipe them. It seemed important not to.
"I want to pay it back," she said. "All of it. I don't have it now. I don't have a job. But when I do."
She expected him to say no. She expected him to say forget it, it's okay, we're friends, the way everybody in her life had said forget it to her father when he tried to pay them back for anything, because he never tried to pay anybody back for anything, he was the one who gave. She expected that, and she realized as she stood there that she had come here partly hoping for it.
Fritz did not say no.
"Okay," he said. "You pay me back."
"Okay."
"Not because I'm a poor man who needs your money. I'm not a poor man. I own this house." He gestured at the narrow green house behind him, with its fence and its snow-capped Virgin, with a kind of fierce plainness. "You pay me back because then it was a loan. A loan is something between two people. If you don't pay, it was something else." He looked at her steadily. "You understand?"
"I understand."
"Forty a week, when you have a job. Not before. I don't want you late on rent because of me, then I'm the bad guy."
"Okay."
"And Abe." His mouth tightened. "Abe should come himself. Not you. Not the lady with the little girl. Him."
"He will," Moira said, though she did not know that. "I think he's trying to."
"Trying." Fritz picked up the shovel again, though there was nothing left to shovel. "Everybody trying." But he said it without bitterness, almost gently, and before she got back in her car he called after her, "Moira. The little boys from the motel. They still come?"
"I don't know," she said. "I haven't been there."
He nodded slowly and looked down the cleared walk toward the street.
"Somebody should find out," he said.
Abe went the following Tuesday. Moira heard about it from Dacia, who heard it from Wendy, who had been on the line when Abe came back in through the alley door at three in the afternoon on his day off, wearing a tie, and went