in her parka unzipped to the waist with the air finally soft and smelling of thawed mud and lake, and when Fritz came out of the alley in his coat with his lunch bag, she stepped up and said his name, and introduced herself, and held out the envelope that said 24.97.
He looked at it and did not take it.
"This is for what?"
"For a pot pie and a cup of chili and a grilled cheese, in February," Ayanna said. "Moira gave them to me. The restaurant won't take the money. I've been carrying it for two months trying to figure out who I owe, and I figured out it's you. You're the one who paid for it."
Fritz looked at her for a long moment, at the envelope, at her neat capitals. Then he laughed, a short, surprised sound, the first she had heard from him, and he took the envelope.
"You're the lady with the little girl," he said.
"I'm the lady with the little girl."
He opened his lunch bag and took out a small notebook and a pencil stub, the kind they give you at the library, and he wrote something in it, slowly, holding it up to the light of the shelter. Ayanna leaned over to see. It said, under a column of dates and forty dollars, forty dollars, forty dollars, Moira balance 1,326.95, and then, beneath it, he wrote -24.97 Lady w/ little girl, and did the subtraction, and drew a line, and wrote the new number.
"Now she owes me less," he said, "and you owe nobody." He tore the page carefully along its edge, folded it, and put it back in his bag. "That's good, I think."
"That's good," Ayanna said.
The number one bus came lumbering up Washington Avenue with its interior lights glowing and its sign saying DOWNTOWN, and they both got on it, and they sat across the aisle from each other without talking much, and when Fritz got off at Thirteenth Street he lifted one hand to her through the window in a small salute, almost formal, and she lifted hers back.
The last time Moira saw the two of them together, that spring, was a rainy Sunday at the Ironwood, in the dead hour between the church crowd and the dinner crowd. Ayanna came in with Nyla, who had grown out of the purple coat's sleeves already, and they sat at the counter, and Ayanna ordered two grilled cheeses and a pecan pie slice to split and a coffee, and asked to see the check before Moira could think about it, and paid it with a card that went through the first time, and left a tip that was exactly twenty percent, figured on a napkin. Nyla read her library book at the counter with her elbows planted and told Moira about it at great length. It was about a girl who lived in a lighthouse.