"I know the drill."
He picked up the pen. I watched his hand try to hold it. It was worse than the coins. The pen skittered across the paper as soon as the tip touched it, leaving a jagged blue line like a seismograph, and he lifted it, and set it down, and it skittered again.
"Do you want me to write it?" I said. "You can tell me what to put."
"No." It came out sharp, sharper than anything he had said to Dot or to Mack, and then he closed his eyes for a second and opened them, and when he spoke again his voice was gentler. "No, thank you. This part I always do myself."
So I stood there. I put my hand flat on the counter next to the money order, not touching it, just there, so that he could brace the heel of his hand against my fingers if he wanted, the way I have seen physical therapists do, and after a moment he did. His hand was dry and very light, like a leaf that had been pressed in a book. He wrote. It took a long time. Behind us, the line stirred and muttered. The teenager took out one earbud to listen. The toddler woke up and began to cry in a thin, exhausted way, and his mother bounced him and said "shh, shh, shh" in the universal rhythm. Mack started tapping his envelopes again.
"Seriously," somebody said, farther back. It might have been the man in the Bills jacket. "Seriously, there's five windows."
"Two windows," Dot said, without looking up. "There's two windows, because there's two of us. You want to come back here and do the other three, I'll get you an application."
The old man's hand slipped. The pen went across the payee line and off the edge of the money order and left a blue streak on the laminate. He made a sound I will not forget, a small sound, not a word, the sound of somebody who has been trying very hard for a very long time and has just been told by his own body, in front of strangers, that it does not matter how hard he tries. His breathing went short and fast. His knuckles went white on the pen. I saw his eyes go to the line behind him, to the faces, to Mack's reflective vest, and I knew that look, I have heard that look through a headset four or five times a week for six years: the moment when a person stops being in the room with you and starts being in the room with everyone who is watching them fail.
I didn't think about it. It's just what I say. I've said it to men having heart attacks on their kitchen floors and to a fourteen-year-old hiding in a closet while her stepfather kicked the door, and to a woman in a car upside down in a ditch on Route 33 who could see her husband in the driver's seat and could not stop looking at him. I say it so often my coworkers tease me about it. They have it on a mug.
I leaned in close to the old man, close enough that only he could hear, and I said, "Hey. Look at me, not at them."
He looked at me.