They both saw him at the same time. Mrs. Dunning did not slow down. The girl did. She stopped dead, in the middle of the lobby, and Kurt watched her whole body go still in the way it had gone still under his hands, and he wanted very badly to stand up, and he understood that standing up was the worst thing he could do, and he stayed on the bench.
Mrs. Dunning stopped and looked back. She did not say anything to the girl. She waited. After a moment the girl came forward again and took Mrs. Dunning's arm on the side away from Kurt, and they crossed the lobby together at Mrs. Dunning's pace, tap and slide, tap and slide, to the steel door of the package room.
Mrs. Dunning punched in the code herself. 4-2-4-2. She opened the door. She held it open with her shoulder and looked across the lobby at Kurt, a long, level, unreadable look, the look of a woman who had worked a serving line for thirty-one years and had seen every kind of child come through it, and he made himself hold it.
Then she went in, and the girl went in after her, and the door swung slowly shut on its pneumatic arm and stopped an inch from the frame.
He could hear them through the gap. Mrs. Dunning's voice, dry, saying something about the bananas. The rustle of the totes. The girl saying, "I've got it, Mrs. D, I've got it," and the old woman saying, "I know you do," and the zipper of an insulated bag going around its corner.
He sat on the bench with his hands on his knees. In his jacket pocket the blue tin pressed against his ribs, small and round and stupid, with its orange sticker on the bottom. He did not know what it was for. He did not know whether it was an apology or a bribe or a confession, or whether there was any way at all he could hand it to anyone in that building without making it one more thing they had to manage on his account. He did not know whether he would still have the green bedroom in January, or whether the complaint would come back sustained or not sustained or simply never come back, or whether the girl in the gray sweatshirt would ever say good morning to him in the stairwell. He did not know who had taken an old woman's chicken in September, or whether that person was in the building right now, behind one of these doors, opening a cupboard and finding it as bare as hers had been. He only knew that he was going to have to find out, someday, somehow, and that when he did, he was going to have to remember this bench and this door and this inch of gap, and keep his hands where they were.
The package room door swung open. The girl came out first, carrying both green totes, one in each hand, leaning a little against the weight. Mrs. Dunning came behind her with the paper sack in her canvas bag over her arm. They started across the lobby toward the elevator.
Halfway there, the girl looked over at him. Just once, quickly, and then away. He could not read it. He did not try.
He took his hand out of his pocket, empty, and left the tin where it was, and sat on the bench and watched them go.