She stood still for a long moment. Then she stepped back from the door, two steps, onto the concrete of the pump island, and left the door standing open, and nodded once.
He came forward. He did not get in. He put one hand on the roof of the car and bent down at the open door, slowly, his knees cracking, until his face was level with the dash, and he stayed there, bent, looking at the medal. He looked at it for a long time. She could see his back rise and fall under the vest.
"It's St. Christopher," he said, without looking up. "She got it at the gift shop at the Old Cathedral. Down by the Arch. My mother. Nineteen eighty-nine. He'd just bought it, the car, and she thought it was the stupidest thing he'd ever done, six thousand five hundred dollars for a used car, she said, Joe, we have a mortgage, Joe, you deliver mail for the government. And then she went down to the Old Cathedral and bought him that, and she took it to a jeweler on Cherokee Street to get it engraved, and she made him screw it in. Not clip it. Screw it, she said, so it can't fall off." He swallowed. "On the back it says J.K. Nineteen eighty-nine. Come home to me. And a P. For Paulette."
Selma put her hand over her mouth.
She did not mean to do it. Her hand went up by itself, the way it had gone up when the doctor came out of the room at Barnes two winters ago, and she stood on the pump island with her palm pressed against her lips and her eyes stinging, and she heard her father's voice in her head as clear as if he were standing beside her with a chamois in his hand, polishing the chrome on a Saturday. Maybe today they come. Maybe today, Selma. Look, I clean it for them.
"Oh," she said through her hand, in Bosnian, and then, because he could not understand that, in English, "oh. Oh, it's you."
The sergeant straightened up. It took him a while. He stood with one hand on the roof of the car, and he looked at her across the open door, and his face was wet. He did not seem to know that it was. He did not wipe it.
"What?" he said.
"You're J.K.'s son."
"Joe Kopecky," he said. "Joseph. He was a letter carrier. Thirty-four years." He looked at her as if she had done a magic trick after all, as if she had pulled his father's name out of the air. "How do you know that? How do you— nobody knows that. It's on the back. You can't even see it. How do you know what it says on the back."
"Because my father took it off," she said, "to change the dash. And then he put it back on."