"Fee's two twenty-five."
He stopped. His hand stopped, even, for a second, which I would learn later was something it almost never did. "It was a dollar sixty-five," he said.
"It was a dollar sixty-five a while ago. It went up in July."
"Nobody told me."
"There was a sign," Dot said, and nodded at a laminated sheet taped to the side of the counter, curling at the edges from the damp, and the old man turned and looked at the sign the way you look at a stranger who has just told you your house is on fire.
He looked back down at his columns of quarters. I watched him do the math. I watched him do it twice. Then he took his wallet out of his coat with his left hand, a cracked black wallet held together with a rubber band, and he opened it and looked inside, and there was nothing in it but a bus pass and a folded piece of paper and a photograph worn so soft at the corners it had gone round.
"I can come back," he said quietly.
"You can come back," Dot agreed, and she started to slide the coins toward him, and that was when Mack said, "Oh, for crying out loud," and the old man flinched like somebody had raised a hand to him.
I don't remember deciding to step out of the line. I remember the box of quilts being in my arms and then being on the floor by the chrome post, and the woman with the toddler giving me a look, and me saying, "Hold my place, I'll be right back," which made no sense, since I was not coming back to that place, I was going forward. I remember the floor squeaking under my wet sneakers. I remember the old man smelled like rain and wintergreen and very faintly of machine oil, which is a smell I have not been able to walk past in my life without wanting to turn and see who it belongs to.
"How much is he short?" I said to Dot.
She looked at me over her glasses. Behind me, Mack exhaled in a way that suggested he had been praying for exactly this and was now annoyed it had come in the form of me.