"Why?"
He opened his mouth. What he had was the report voice, the ironed-flat sentences, observed in the package room, food items in her possession, refused to explain, and he could feel them lined up in his throat, and he could not make himself say a single one of them to her.
"I thought she was stealing your groceries," he said.
Mrs. Dunning looked at him. She looked at the table. She looked at the Fairmont slip stapled to the strap of her tote, and at the chicken on the floor beside it, plump and pale in its plastic, a whole fryer, three point eight pounds at ninety-nine cents a pound, the thing she had stopped ordering because she could not afford to lose it twice.
"Did you read my slip?" she said.
He did not answer.
"Before you put your hands on her. Before you emptied her book bag out on that table like trash. Did you read the paper the store stapled on my bag so anybody with eyes could see what I bought?"
"No, ma'am."
"No," Mrs. Dunning said. "No. You didn't." She stood with both hands on the head of her cane and looked at him, and he felt himself, at forty-four, a police officer with sixteen years on the job and a commendation for pulling a man out of a burning car on Portland Avenue, become very small, smaller than he had been in years, the size of a boy in a Safeway in Everett. "Thirty-one years," she said, "I worked a serving line at Hunt Middle School and Stewart and Lincoln. You know how many children came through my line who didn't have lunch money? Couldn't tell you. Hundreds. Thousands. And you know how many of them I made stand there while I asked them about it in front of their friends?" She waited. He did not answer, and she nodded as if he had. "Not one. You put the tray down and you put the food on it and you say next. You don't make a child explain why she's hungry. You don't make anybody." She took a breath, and for the first time something in her voice shook. "And you certainly don't make a child explain why she's feeding somebody else."
Behind her, the girl had started to cry again, silently, with her hand over her mouth. Isaac Lowry put his arm around her.