stood out past his own shoulders like the eaves of a house, and his neck came up out of the collar thin and corded as a plucked bird's. He had a wool cap in one hand and a rubber-tipped aluminum cane hooked over the edge of the counter, and his other hand, his right hand, was trying to pick coins out of a plastic sandwich bag and lay them on the counter, and it could not do it.
I don't mean it was slow. I mean it could not do it. The hand shook in a way I recognized from work, a deep steady tremor, the kind that does not stop when you are resting, so that every time his fingers closed on a quarter the quarter jumped out of them like it was alive. He would get one, and lose it, and it would ring on the laminate and roll, and he would put the bag down to chase it with his left hand, and then the bag would tip, and more coins would spill, and he would stop and stand there breathing and start again.
"Sir," Dot said. "Sir. I can count it for you if you just push the whole bag over."
"I've got it," the old man said. His voice was deeper than I expected, rough and low, the voice of somebody who used to talk over machinery. "I've almost got it."
"It's just that there's a line."
"I know there's a line."
There was a line. I was seventh in it. In front of me was a woman with a toddler asleep on her shoulder, and in front of her a teenager with earbuds in, and in front of him three men, two in work clothes and one in a Bills jacket, and the man directly behind the old man was a big contractor type with a gray goatee and a reflective vest under his rain shell. The back of his vest said MACK'S CONCRETE in stenciled letters, so I decided his name was Mack.
Mack had a stack of certified-mail envelopes in his hand, and he was tapping them against his thigh. Tap, tap, tap. Every time a coin hit the floor, the tapping got faster.
"Buddy," Mack said finally, not unkindly, but not kindly either. "Let her count it. She does this all day."
"I can count my own money."
"Nobody's saying you can't."
The old man got another quarter onto the counter and lined it up with the others. He was making columns, I saw. Little stacks of four quarters each, like a cashier. There were nine stacks. Then a row of dimes, and some nickels, and three crumpled singles smoothed flat under a pewter-colored lighter that I would have bet my car he had not used to light anything in years.
"What are you trying to do, honey?" Dot asked him. She was maybe sixty, with reading glasses pushed up into hair that had been dyed a burgundy no hair has ever naturally been, and she had the face of a woman who had worked a federal counter through three recessions and a pandemic and had decided long ago that she would not be hurried by anybody, including herself. "Tell me what you need and I'll tell you what it costs."
"A money order," he said. "Fifty dollars. Same as always."
"Fifty dollars plus the fee."