The woman set her jaw tight and waved him away.

Sometimes, too, a coin was slipped to her by the florist’s husband who also stole from the money box for himself. Lin kept silent about this. They had a secret pact. He didn’t tell that he helped her, she didn’t tell that he went to the square and gambled with cards and dice. Sometimes he let her wash her hair so she wouldn’t get lice like the others who lived out there on streets or alleyways. The woman herself was usually too busy to notice and perhaps, truly, she wouldn’t have cared anyway, but the husband and Lin felt like conspirators and they enjoyed it. Nevertheless, the woman became suspicious when the man lost too much. The woman, thinking the missing money was because of Lin, said, “You give the girl money. Or maybe she takes it. I think she could be a thief.”

“No. I don’t. I give her nothing. She doesn’t take it, either. It was the boy,” he lied. “He came in today. I had to pay him again not to break the windows.”

“Ai, him again.”

But Lin thought the woman knew more than she said.

And yet Lin had the soft palms of a child and a sweetness about her and the woman softened now and then, and gave her a meal with sweet rice and sometimes mango.

Because of the kindness and persistent pleading of the shopkeeper’s husband, Lin was given a job at the flower shop cleaning. She cleaned the dark green doorway. She cleaned up the leaves and petals that fell on the yellow floor.

“Sometimes I think of her as a niece,” the man said.

His wife did not smile at this. She thought of her own daughter, the one now killed.

Then one afternoon as it rained and while they were closed for their afternoon naps, Lin fell asleep on the floor of the shop in the back room and she had a dream and began screaming and she cried like a child.

The woman went to her. “It’s all right. Shh.” Then she saw her shoes, her feet showing through the bottom, cracked and scarred and looking sore. She began to think, for the first time, of the girl’s history, and for the first time, that Lin was just a child, a very young child, not a threat or a problem. She considered where she might have come from, what she might have seen. One part of her thought, well, hadn’t they all? But then, instead of thinking that the girl, like everyone else, was just another taker, a small contriving adult, the woman picked her up and held her against her heart, feeling a movement of her own grief, how small Lin was, a girl like her daughter had once been. Now only a picture on her altar. The man watched, his own eyes with tears, thinking of the child they had lost when the communists stormed Saigon and everyone tried to escape.