"No," Kurt said. "No, I wouldn't either."
"And she's coming down for her own delivery now. Every Thursday. Elevator or no elevator. She says nobody's going to sneak around that bag again, not for her and not against her, and if the elevator's out she'll take the stairs one at a time and the whole building can wait." Isaac glanced down the hallway toward the lobby. "Del's going to help her carry. Out in the open. Mrs. Dunning's idea."
He turned to go, and then turned back.
"I don't know how the complaint's going to come out," he said. "I don't know if they'll do anything. Probably they won't do much. I know how that goes." He said it plainly, as a man reporting a fact about the weather. "But I'm not going to stop living here because of it. And neither are you, I guess. So." He nodded once, at nothing, and went back down the hallway toward the stairs, and Kurt stood in the doorway until he heard the stairwell door close on the second-floor landing and then the third.
On Thursday he worked a day shift, traded with a guy named Pacheco who owed him, and got off at three. On the way home he stopped at the Bayview Outlet Grocery on Sixth Avenue. He had driven past it a thousand times. It was in a strip mall between a check-cashing place and a shuttered shoe repair, with a faded orange sign and a row of shopping carts chained out front, and inside it was bright and narrow and smelled of overripe bananas and floor cleaner, and everything on the shelves had a small round orange sticker on it, a wave and a sun, slightly crooked, as if each one had been put on by hand, which, he saw, watching a teenage boy in a vest work his way down the canned vegetables with a sticker gun, it had.
He walked every aisle. He did not know what he was looking for. In the cookie aisle, on the bottom shelf, next to the off-brand sandwich cremes, there was a stack of small round blue tins of Danish butter cookies, $2.99. He stood and looked at them for a long time. Then he took one to the register and paid for it with a five and put the change in the jar for the food bank and walked out to his car with the tin in his jacket pocket, heavier than it should have been, its edge pressing into his side.
He got to Sefton Court at three-twenty. He did not go to his apartment. He sat down on the bench by the corkboard in the lobby, in uniform, because he had not had time to change, and because he thought that it would be worse, somehow, to change; that whatever he was going to be in that lobby that afternoon, he should be it in the clothes he had been wearing when he did it.
The Fairmont van came at three thirty-four. The same driver, the green fleece, the scanner on the lanyard. He nodded at Kurt, looked at the uniform a second longer than last week, and went into the package room and came out with empty hands and left.
At three forty-two the elevator chimed, and the doors opened, and Coretta Dunning came out of it with her cane in one hand and her canvas tote folded over the other arm and Delphine Lowry walking beside her in a gray hooded sweatshirt with the sleeves pulled all the way down over her hands.