He blinked. The corner of the mustache lifted. "The firefighters?"
Nora felt the blood climb up her throat and into her face, and she was grateful, for once, that her cheeks were already red from the wind. She lifted her chin. "The cause," she said, with enormous seriousness. "The noble cause."
He said nothing at all to that. He only nodded, gravely, as if she had made an excellent point about municipal policy, and his eyes were laughing at her, and she found to her irritation that she very much wanted to laugh too.
It was at that moment, while both of them were looking at each other and neither of them was looking at the turkey, that a small figure in a lavender coat stepped between them.
She did not say excuse me. She did not say anything at all. She was perhaps five feet tall, and she wore a lavender wool coat with big round buttons and a matching lavender hat pinned to a cloud of white hair, and she smelled faintly of violet talc and cold air. She reached into the narrow space between their two outstretched arms with a pair of small hands in white kid gloves, took hold of the net bag in the middle, and lifted. Nora was so astonished that her fingers simply opened. So, apparently, did his. The old woman settled the twenty-pound turkey against her hip as easily as if it were a sack of laundry, turned without a glance at either of them, and walked away down the aisle toward the register, her sensible black heels tapping, her lavender hat bobbing past the empty shelves where the canned pumpkin used to be.
Nora and the firefighter stood there with their hands still out, holding nothing.
They watched her go. She paid Bonnie Szabo in exact change, counted out of a little beaded purse. She did not look back. The bell over the door rang its tired ring, and a gust of snow blew in across the rubber mat, and she was gone.
The man slowly lowered his hand. He looked at it as if it had betrayed him.