He looked at her, and she watched him look, the way you'd watch a radio dial searching for a station through static. Then it found it. His face rearranged itself.
"Josefina," he said. "Of course. You've got sun on your nose."
"I went to the drugstore."
"You should wear a hat. Your grandmother always wore a hat." He looked at the window, where the afternoon light came slanting in across the linoleum. "Is it Saturday? I have to open up."
"It's Tuesday," she said. "The shop's closed now, remember? You retired."
"Ah." He nodded slowly. "Yes. I retired." He said it like a man repeating a word in a foreign language.
She got a glass of water from the kitchen and counted out the pills on the counter, the yellow one and the white one and the half of a pink one for his blood pressure, and brought them to him in the little blue saucer that had been her grandmother's. He took them without arguing, which was a good-day thing. On bad days he said she was trying to poison him and once he had thrown the saucer, and it had a chip in it now, on the side she kept turned away.
The front door had a hook and eye up near the top of the frame, higher than he would think to look. She had put it in herself in March, the week he'd walked out at three in the morning in his slippers and she'd found him standing in the middle of Pine Street looking up at the stars, and he'd said, very reasonably, that he was waiting for the parts truck. The back door had one too. His old Ford pickup sat in the side yard with its hood shut and a full tank of gas, and it would not start, because the distributor rotor was in the pocket of Josie's cutoffs, a little plastic piece about the size of a thumb, warm against her leg. She had taken it out in April. He'd tried to start the truck twice since then, and both times he'd cranked it a while and then come in and said the old girl was finally done for, and both times she'd agreed.
She sat on the arm of the couch and watched the man on the TV saw through a tin can.
"Aitona," she said. "Do you remember a man named Dale Haskett?"
Her grandfather didn't take his eyes off the screen. "That's a good knife," he said.
"He's got a Shovelhead. A seventy-six FLH. Black."
"They're all black, the FLHs. That was the thing back then. You could have any color you wanted." He smiled at something private. "Is it Saturday?"