"Hi, Juno," he said. "My name's Rodney. I'm a police officer here in town."
She looked at him. Her mouth was clamped shut now, a straight hard line, as though the one word had used up everything and she was not going to risk another.
"I scared you," he said. "I'm sorry about that. I was asking your mom some questions because I didn't know who she was, and that's part of my job, but I asked her too many, and I asked them the wrong way, and I think that scared both of you. Your mom's not in any trouble. She didn't do anything wrong. She's not going anywhere with me. Okay? She's going home with you."
Nothing. Her arms did not come down. Behind her, Brooke had lifted her face out of her daughter's hair and was looking at him over Juno's shoulder with an expression he could not read at all.
"You know what," Rodney said, "I'm going to stand up and go back to my car. And I'm going to give your mom back her things first."
He held out the three cards. Not to Brooke; to the girl. He held them out flat on his open palm, the paper license folded into quarters and the little white card from the Secretary of State and, on the bottom, face down so that the name did not show, the old plastic license with the hole punched through its corner.
Juno looked at the cards. She looked at him. Then one of her arms came down, slowly, and she took them off his palm, all three, quick, the way you'd take a cracker off the palm of a hand from a strange dog, and held them against her chest. Her other arm stayed out.
He stood up. It took a while. He stepped back two paces, then a third, until he was standing beside the open door of the cruiser. Then the girl let her other arm fall, and turned around inside her mother's hug, and put both her arms around her mother's neck and her face into the collar of the gray hoodie, and Brooke closed her eyes and held on.
Rodney turned around and looked at the white Tahoe.
He walked over to it. The car line had begun moving again, in a stunned, careful way, the cars rolling forward one length at a time, and the Tahoe had not moved because the woman behind the wheel had not taken her foot off the brake. She rolled her window down when he got there. She was about forty, with a lot of highlighted hair and a lanyard from the hospital around her neck and two car seats in the back, one of them empty and one with a toddler in it asleep with his mouth open.