"I don't know yet," she said, "if we're staying."
"I understand."
"We moved four times before here. The last one was because somebody at a gas station took a picture of my car." She looked at the Tahoe, which was at the front of the line now, its rear door open, a child climbing in. "This is the longest we've been anywhere."
"I hope you stay," he said. "For what it's worth."
She nodded once, and did not say whether it was worth anything, and took Juno's hand. Juno held out the three cards to her without looking up, and Brooke took them, and looked at them on her palm: the paper, the little white card, and the old one, face down. She turned the old one over. She looked for a long moment at the woman in the picture with the long blonde hair and the pink lipstick and the smile. Then she put all three back in her wallet, the old one last, behind the others, where it had been, and put Rodney Prentice's card in front of it.
They walked off down Cordell Street toward the bus stop at the corner of Fifth, the woman in the gray hoodie and the girl in the purple jacket with the backpack too big for her, and the leaves came down around them, and the girl did not look back. Rodney watched them all the way to the corner. He could not hear anything at that distance. But just before they turned onto Fifth, he saw the girl tug on her mother's hand and her mother bend down, and he saw the girl's mouth moving, going and going, a long sentence, a whole paragraph maybe, up into her mother's ear, and he saw the mother stop on the corner and stand there in the falling leaves with her hand pressed over her eyes.
He got back into the cruiser. The photograph from the BMV was still up on the laptop screen, the unsmiling woman under the bad light. He looked at it for a while. Then he closed it, and keyed the mic.
"Fourteen."
"Go ahead, Fourteen."
"Fourteen, I'm clear at Cordell Street. Contact made with the mother of a student. Unfounded."