They left in the late light. Caleb walked a half step ahead and then remembered to wait, a boy practicing the choreography of being someone’s child in a parking lot. Denise’s blazer moved through the door and became, outside, just a coat on a woman who would have to drive home and be ordinary. Emily watched them until the minivan, which was not a minivan but a dark sedan kept very clean, pulled onto the road. Then she turned back to the floor, because the floor was still there, and because Glenn had dropped a fork, and because the life she had described as a street did not pause to applaud a conversation.
The bins took an hour. Tomato pulp, lemon rinds, the soft collapse of uneaten bread. Toni worked beside her in a companionable silence that eventually broke, as companionable silences do, on a factual rock.
“So,” Toni said. “You a math lady.”
“I was,” Emily said. “I am. The tense is the part I’m working on.”