"They might," Aaliyah said. "She respects uniforms more than speeches."
He grinned, quick, and went back to the counter, where the line had become interested in him in a new way, as if he were adjacent to talent and the adjacency might rub off on the muffins. He paid for the hot chocolate out of his own pocket with a swipe he would feel on Friday and did not regret.
Ruth arrived with a paper plate of pizza and the face Aaliyah had predicted.
It was not the angry face, not first. It was the face of a woman who had heard music across a food court and recognized the kitchen phrase in it the way you recognize your own doorway in a photograph of a street. She had stopped walking. The plate tilted. A slice nearly escaped. She caught it with a napkin and her pride. Then she saw the cluster — the sharply dressed woman, the father, the little boy at the keys, the phones on the railing — and the second face arrived, the one that remembered that public doesn't always mean welcome, and that attention is a weather that can turn.
She came to Aaliyah at a pace that tried not to run.
"Are you all right?" she asked, low.
"Yes, ma'am."