She did not run. She was a grown woman of twenty-eight and a teacher of small children, and she had dignity. But she walked very fast, and her heels clicked on the linoleum, and the skirt of her camel coat swung against her knees, and she had just put out her hand when another hand — larger, bare, red-knuckled from the cold — came down on the other end of the net bag.
She looked up.
He was tall, and he was wearing a brown suede jacket that had gone dark at the shoulders where the snow had melted into it, and under the jacket a flannel shirt in a plaid that had been washed until it was soft. He had dark hair that needed cutting and a thick mustache, the kind half the men in America seemed to be wearing that year, but on him it looked less like a fashion and more like a decision he had made a long time ago and saw no reason to revisit. He was about thirty-three, she guessed. His eyes were brown and patient and, at this exact moment, faintly amused.
Neither of them let go.
"Don't you dare," Nora said.
He raised his eyebrows. "Dare what?"
"That's my turkey."
He glanced down at the bird, then back up at her, and he made a little show of examining the frosted label, turning the bag an inch toward the light. "Doesn't have your name on it."