It came out in a landslide. A math textbook with a cover so worn the corners were white. A three-ring binder, purple, plastered with stickers, a cartoon frog, a planet, a sticker that said I'D RATHER BE READING in curly letters. A library book from the Moore branch, Brown Girl Dreaming, with a pencil stuck in it. A zippered pencil case. A crumpled permission slip for a field trip to the Point Defiance Zoo. A water bottle with a dent. An inhaler. A hair pick. And then, because the textbooks had been on top and the rest had been packed underneath them, carefully, he would realize later, in the order of what would bruise, the groceries.
Two cans of Progresso split pea with ham. A can of Bumble Bee pink salmon. A box of Lipton tea, the yellow box, a hundred bags. A jar of Smucker's seedless blackberry jam, which hit the table and rolled and he caught it before it went over the edge. A box of saltines. A plastic bag of clementines, eight or nine of them, which split and sent two of them bouncing across the floor. A six-pack of vanilla Ensure, the little plastic bottles shrink-wrapped together. A pound of butter in its paper box. A small round blue tin of Danish butter cookies, the kind every grandmother in America kept sewing supplies in, which landed on its edge and rolled in a circle and fell over with a clatter that seemed very loud.
And a card. A small white card, the size of an index card but heavier, that slid out of the binder pocket and landed face up on top of the saltines. It had a green leaf printed in the corner over a little red barn, a decent copy of the Fairmont logo, drawn by hand in marker and colored in. Under the logo, in careful printing, someone had lettered: FAIRMONT MARKET NEIGHBOR REWARDS. Thank you for being a valued customer! Please enjoy these complimentary items with our compliments. And under that, in smaller letters: Week 6.
Kurt looked at the card for a long moment. He picked it up. He turned it over. The back was blank.
He looked at the cans, the tea, the cookies. He looked at the open Fairmont tote on the floor beside the table, the brown paper sack still folded over at the top. He looked at the white paper bag the girl was still clutching against her chest. Week 6. He felt the shape of the thing assemble itself in his head with the dreadful satisfaction of a puzzle piece going in: a girl who had been stealing an old woman's groceries for weeks, taking what she wanted and leaving a fake rewards card so that the old woman would not notice what was missing, or would think the store had made a mistake, or—he did not know exactly how the card worked into it. It did not matter. It was a forgery. It was a kid's forgery, crayon-careful, but it was a forgery, and it meant she had planned this.
"These are hers," he said.
The girl's face changed. "Yes," she said. "Yes, they're hers, they're all hers, please—"
She lunged past him for the table. He thought, afterward, that he would have done the same thing at her age, if he had believed what she believed, which was that there were thirty seconds left before something terrible happened. She swept her arm across the table and gathered the cans and the tea and the jam against her body and turned toward the Fairmont tote on the floor, and he did not know what she was doing. He thought she was running. He thought she was trying to destroy evidence, or get out the door with an armload of food, or he did not think anything at all, he only moved, the way sixteen years had taught his body to move when somebody who was supposed to be still was suddenly not.
He took hold of her arms.
He took hold of both of them, above the elbows, from behind, and he held on. He did not throw her against anything. He did not put her on the floor. He would write that down later, in the report, and it would be true, and it would not be anywhere near the whole truth. The cans fell out of her arms. The jam jar hit the linoleum and did not break, and the salmon rolled under the shelf to join the soup, and the blue cookie tin landed on her foot. She was so light. That was what he would remember. She weighed nothing. She pulled once, hard, against his grip, and then she went rigid, not fighting, just stiff, the way a cat goes stiff, and her breath was coming in fast high gasps.