The man looked at Kurt over his daughter's head. Kurt would think about that look for a long time. There was no request in it, exactly, and no forgiveness, but there was something like an assessment, the look of a man deciding whether a tool was any use.
"Mrs. Dunning won't take it from us," the man said. "I asked her. Back in August, before any of this, when Del noticed her fridge. I asked her straight out and she looked at me like I'd spit on her floor. She took care of Del after school for two years when I was working late, and she would not let me pay her, and she will not take a can of soup from me. So we started putting it in the bag. Del made the card. Fairmont Neighbor Rewards." Something moved in the corner of his mouth that was not quite a smile. "She believes it. She wrote them a thank-you note. Del had to talk her out of mailing it."
From the lobby, through the steel door, came the low electric hum of the elevator, and then the clank of its cables taking up the weight.
The girl pulled out of her father's arms and went to the table and began, frantically, to gather the groceries up again. Her hands were shaking. A clementine got away from her and rolled off the edge, and Kurt caught it without thinking and held it out to her, and she looked at it in his hand and then at his face, and took it from him with two fingers, as if it were hot, and he saw the marks on her arms.
She had pushed the sleeves of her school sweatshirt up to work, and there, on the soft brown skin of both upper arms just above the elbows, were the marks of his hands. They were red, not yet anything darker, four long ovals on the outside of each arm and a broader one on the inside where his thumbs had been. They were very clear. They looked exactly like what they were.
He stood there holding nothing. The girl pulled her sleeves back down over the marks with a quick, practiced, furious tug, and went on packing.
The elevator doors opened in the lobby with their two-note chime. Kurt heard the slow tap and slide of a cane on tile, unhurried, coming closer. The man, Isaac, Kurt thought, his name is Isaac, bent and picked up one of his own Bayview bags from the floor by the door and reached into it and brought out a whole chicken in its shrink-wrap and set it down beside the Fairmont tote with a kind of hopeless care, and the girl was on her knees trying to fit the cookie tin into the bottom of the bag under the bread, and it was not going to fit, and all three of them knew it was not going to fit, and then the steel door swung open and Coretta Dunning stood in it in a long brown raincoat and a knitted hat the color of plums, with her cane in one hand and an empty canvas tote folded over her other arm, and looked at them.
Nobody said anything.
She looked at the girl on her knees on the linoleum with the cookie tin in her hands. She looked at Isaac Lowry standing beside the open Bayview bag with the chicken at his feet. She looked at the folding table, at the purple binder and the library book and the hair pick and the inhaler scattered among cans of soup and a bag of clementines. And she looked at Kurt, standing against the shelving in his Seahawks sweatshirt with his jacket pushed open and his badge on his belt and his hands hanging empty at his sides, and he watched her put it together, not all at once, but in order, the way she had told him about her missing groceries, one exact thing after another.
Her eyes went to the card. It was still lying on the table where he had dropped it, face up on the box of saltines. FAIRMONT MARKET NEIGHBOR REWARDS. Week 6.