She was eighty-eight, on a fixed income, and had put forty dollars in the card because she still pictured him at thirty-five as a boy who might need bus fare. She pressed it into his palm with both of her hands. There was a knitted scarf, and cookies on a plate with a doily under them, and she asked whether he was eating enough.

He said don't worry about me. He knew the exact machine, and he knew the money would be gone by nine. Forty feet down her walk he stopped. He came back and sat on her couch for two hours instead, eating cookies, listening to a story about his grandfather he had heard before, the card still folded in his coat.