"Excuse me," Selma said. "Can I help you, Officer?"
He straightened up. He came around the front of the car, past the squared-off grille and the star, and stopped six or seven feet from her, with the car's long hood between them and the pump island at his back. Up close his face was red across the cheeks and nose in the way of a man who spent a lot of time outdoors or drank, or both, and his eyes were a very pale gray-blue, and they did not look at her. They looked past her, at the driver's window, at the interior, at the dash.
"This your car?" he said.
"Yes."
"This is your car."
"Yes, sir. It's my car."
And he laughed.
It was not a big laugh. It was short, a single breath let out through the nose and the corner of the mouth, the kind of laugh a man gives when someone tells him the check is in the mail. It was the laugh of someone who had been told a story he had heard before. He shook his head a little, and for the first time he looked directly at her, and she watched him take her in, all of her, the navy blue coat and the plain gray scarf pinned under her chin and the work boots she had not changed out of and her face, which was forty-one years old and did not wear makeup on weekdays, and she watched him arrive at a conclusion.
"Okay," he said. "Sure it is."
"I'm sorry?"
"Ma'am." He said it the way you would say it to a child who had been caught with a hand in a cookie jar and was explaining that the cookies had fallen in. "Come on. You're telling me this is yours. This car. Your car." His eyes went, very briefly, to her scarf and back. "Not your husband's. Not your uncle's. Not some guy's who sold it to your cousin for cash out of a lot in East St. Louis. Yours."