"Yes."
He laughed again, shorter. "A lady like you."
She said nothing. Across the island the young man with the pickup had finished fueling and hung up his nozzle and was standing by his truck with his hands in the pocket of his sweatshirt. The QuikTrip employee under the overhang had lowered her phone.
Selma had been here before. Not here, at this pump, with this man; but here, in this place that was not a place but a kind of weather, a kind of light. She had been here at nineteen at a Schnucks when a woman in a fleece vest told her to go back where she came from, and she had said, very politely, Ma'am, I came from Itaska Street, and the woman had looked at her like she had been slapped. She had been here at twenty-six at an airport, in a small room with a table and two chairs and a man from the government who wanted to know why she had traveled to Sarajevo for eleven days, and she had told him it was to bury her grandmother, which was true, and he had asked her the same question four more times in different words, and she had answered it the same way four more times in the same words, until he let her go. She had been here a dozen times at a dozen gas stations and parts counters and parent-teacher nights, every time someone looked at her and arrived at a conclusion, and she knew what it felt like, the heat that came up the back of her neck under the scarf, the way her hands wanted to shake and she would not let them. She knew what to do with it. You set it down. You set it on the floor next to you, like a heavy bag you would pick up again later, and you kept your hands free.
"Officer," she said. "Is there a problem with the car?"
"You tell me."
"I don't think so."
"No? You don't think so." He put his hands on his belt, one on either side of the buckle, thumbs hooked in. "Where'd you get it?"
"It was my father's."
"Your father's."
"Yes."