"Yeah," he said. "When you put it like that, it sounds like fate. Or a really bad union. I don't know. Do you want to see the movie or not?"
Theda looked at the black plastic case in his hand. ONLY COPY. HANDLE LIKE A BABY. She thought about Monica Kimball's thin, elegant, mocking face, and about Mr. Corso's face lighting up like the Biltmore sign, and about the twenty-two pieces lying in a velvet-lined case in the vault on Chestnut Street, the little bus and the doughnut earrings and the trumpet, all of it made out of not knowing. She thought about her shoe.
"Naturally," she said.
They made the bus with ninety seconds to spare, which Nicky said was a personal worst for him and a personal best for anybody in one shoe.
It had been a hard walk. They had gone down Wickenden and across the bridge over the Providence River, where the water was high and brown and fast and full of hurricane branches, and up South Water Street past the dark, shuttered warehouses, and the rain had come at them sideways off the river so that Theda's umbrella, a collapsible thing from Ann & Hope that had cost a dollar ninety-nine and was worth every penny of that and not one cent more, turned itself inside out twice. The second time, Nicky took it from her, looked at it with professional sympathy, and folded it up and put it in his jacket pocket like a man putting a dead bird out of its misery. After that he walked on the river side of her, which blocked most of the wind, and she did not thank him for it, because she was not sure he had done it on purpose, and she did not want to thank a man for an accident.
Her shoeless foot had gone from cold to painful to a kind of distant, philosophical numbness by the time they reached Kennedy Plaza. Under the glass shelters a dozen people waited with the hunched patience of people who have waited for buses all their lives: two nurses in white shoes, a boy in a Members Only jacket nodding along to his Walkman, an old man with a cardboard box tied up with string that said FRAGILE — PIGEONS. The Biltmore Hotel rose up behind them with its red sign glowing through the rain, and across the plaza the dark bulk of City Hall sat like a wedding cake nobody had come to eat.
The Elmwood bus came in at nine thirty-eight, a long white-and-blue GM with a fishbowl windshield and its wipers going, and wheezed to a stop in front of them, and the door folded open with a gasp of warm air and diesel. The driver was a heavyset Cape Verdean man with a gray mustache and a RIPTA cap pushed back on his head, and when he saw Nicky climbing the steps behind Theda he leaned back in his seat and lifted both hands from the wheel in elaborate amazement.
"DeLuca," he said. "You live on this thing now?"
"Barney. How's it going."
"Your shift ended at four."
"I'm aware."
"And you're riding the nine-forty to Elmwood. Back to the garage. On your own time." Barney Coelho looked from Nicky to Theda to Theda's foot. "With a lady. Who has one shoe."
"It's a long story," said Theda.
"They all are, sweetheart. Fifty cents."
Theda dug in her coat pocket and found a quarter, a dime, and a button. Nicky put a dollar in the farebox for both of them before she could finish counting, and when she turned to object he was already walking down the aisle, so she said "I'll pay you back" to his shoulders, and he said "Sure, sure" without turning around, which she was beginning to understand was the thing he said instead of arguing.