He did not answer right away. He looked at the car again, at the dash through the windshield, and she had the sudden absurd sense that he was not talking to her at all, that she was a person who happened to be standing beside the car he was having a conversation with.
"This vehicle," he said, "matches the description of a stolen vehicle."
"Which stolen vehicle?"
"A stolen vehicle."
"From when?"
"That's not—" He stopped. "Ma'am, I'm going to need to see your license. And the registration on this car."
"I'll show you my license," she said. "It's in my coat pocket, the inside one, on the left. I'm going to reach in for it now with my left hand. Is that all right?"
He watched her as if she were doing a magic trick and he was trying to see how. "Go ahead."
She reached in slowly and took out the small leather wallet her daughter had given her on Mother's Day and opened it and took out her license and held it out across the hood. He had to come around the front of the car to take it. He took it and looked at it and looked at her and looked at it again. Selma Hodžić, the license said, and her address on Neosho Street, and her birthday, and her picture, in the same gray scarf, unsmiling, because the woman at the license office had told her not to smile.
"How do you say that," he said.
"Hodžić. Like hodge, and then itch."