"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.
Something happened to his face then that I did not understand for a long time. I thought at first that he was just startled, the way people are when you speak to them low and close. But it was more than that. The color went out of him all at once, from his forehead down, like somebody had pulled a plug. His mouth opened. His pale eyes moved over my face, very slowly, from my hair to my eyes to my chin, and stopped on my chin, where I have a small white scar shaped like a fishhook that I mostly forget about until somebody stares at it. He stared at it. The pen in his hand had stopped shaking. I mean it had actually stopped, for maybe three seconds, which I did not know at the time was a kind of miracle.
"What did you say?" he whispered.
"I said look at me." I kept my voice even. Dispatcher voice. "Not at them. They don't matter. It's just you and the paper. Take your time."
He kept looking at me. Then he swallowed, and looked down at the paper, and wrote. The hand shook again, but he wrote, slowly, a little at a time, bracing against my fingers, and I did not look at what he was writing because it was not mine to look at. When he was done he folded the money order once, and then again, and slid it into an envelope that he had brought already addressed and stamped, and sealed it by pressing the flap down with the side of his fist, three times, hard.