I gave her a ten. She gave me back three dollars and sixty cents, which I put in the old man's coat pocket while he was looking at the counter, and he felt it go in and said, "Hey," and I said, "That's your change. You gave her the ten, I just handed it over," and he looked at me with his mouth slightly open and did not say anything else.
It was the first time I really saw his face. He was old, older than I had thought from behind, eighty at least, with skin that had gone loose and spotted along the jaw and a nose that had been broken once, a long time ago, and set crooked. His eyes were pale gray and wet at the rims. There was a white scar through his left eyebrow that split it into two short pieces. He had shaved that morning, carefully, and missed a patch under his right ear, and something about that missed patch, the effort of the rest of it and the one place the shaking hand had not been able to reach, made my throat close up in a way that embarrassed me.
"I'll pay you back," he said.
"You won't, though," I said. "I'm only in town for another week."
"Then I'll pay somebody else back."
"That works."
Dot printed the money order. The machine behind her made a sound like a small animal clearing its throat and pushed out the long slip of paper with the Statue of Liberty watermark on it, and she tore it along the perforations and laid it on the counter in front of him with a pen.
"Purchaser and payee," she said. "And the address. You know the drill."
"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."