She thought of the order she had placed two weeks ago, of Art Kessler gone home and the book lost, of the bare shelves behind her. She gave the net bag a small tug, which he absorbed without moving at all, and played the only card she had.
"I've got twelve relatives coming."
She said it the way a general might announce the size of an approaching army. Twelve relatives. Aunt Rosemary and Uncle Pete from Scranton, and their three, and Aunt Dot and her new husband whom nobody liked, and her father's cousin Lorraine from Erie with the twins, and old Uncle Ambrose, who would sit in the good chair and tell the story about the war. Twelve people who had been coming to the Haverty house on Thanksgiving for as long as she could remember, and who had kept coming even after there was no one left in the Haverty house but Nora.
The man nodded slowly, as if he respected the figure. Then he said, in the same mild voice, "I've got twenty firefighters."
Nora opened her mouth and nothing came out of it.
There was something about the way he said it — not bragging, not playing a trump card, just stating it, the way he might have said it was snowing. Twenty firefighters. She pictured them, unbidden, a long table of broad-shouldered men in undershirts, and then she pictured this particular man in a helmet and a heavy coat, walking out of smoke, and something warm and entirely unauthorized moved through her chest, and before she could stop it her mouth said, "Okay, that's actually hot."
The words hung in the cold air of the frozen-food aisle like breath.