He tipped his head, very slightly, at the little girl beside him, who was chasing the last raisin around the plate with the side of her fork and did not look up.
"My girl," he said. "Jolynn."
Dovie looked up then. She had heard her mother's name the way children hear their names through a wall, without hearing anything around it. "Mama's in Reno," she told Coralee. "She's got a apartment with a yellow door. She painted it. She let me paint the bottom part where she couldn't reach without bending."
"A yellow door," Coralee said. "That sounds real nice."
"It's on Ralston Street. Upstairs. There's a lady downstairs with a parrot that says hello Morty. Nobody there is named Morty." Dovie frowned. "I asked."
"Eat your pie, punkin," the old man said.
"I ate it."
"Then drink your water."
Coralee went and got the coffee pot, because it gave her something to do. She came back and topped him up, though he had not drunk more than an inch, and set the pot down on the table's edge, and without thinking about it, the way she did fifty times a night, she slid her right hand into her apron pocket and found the coin with her thumb. The triangle side. She could feel the little raised letters running around the edge without reading them. To thine own self be true.
The old man watched her do it.
He watched her hand go into the pocket and he watched it stay there, and Coralee saw him watch it, and something went cold and quiet at the back of her neck.