He’s unhurt, but he has landed on a woman, who has twisted her ankle.

2

Bill, as a fifteen-year-old: he’s in his room in Oakland, the sheets pulled around him, shielding him from the lonely dark of the attic and the darkness beyond, the night sounds of the world muted, the city silenced.

He hears Mame and Grandpa in muffled conversation downstairs—Mame moving from room to room, Grandpa following her around in his creaking wheelchair, asking her what she’s looking for, growing crosser as she continues to ignore him. His chest clenching, Bill slips out of his room to the staircase landing to keep watch.

He hadn’t expected Mame to discover the loss so quickly. It’s too late now to slip downstairs and replace the note where he found it. Mame wouldn’t believe she hadn’t looked there already.

Her face grim, her glasses high on the bridge of her nose, she’s done looking. She finally says to Grandpa: She’s missing a hundred-dollar bill. She dropped it while counting money she withdrew from the bank, had found it later and placed it—where? she’s losing her memory—intending to return it to her purse. And Grandpa says he’d have saved her the trouble if she’d told him earlier. He came across it and put it away but forgot to tell her about it—he’s growing old too. A minute later he returns from the bedroom with a bill.

Mame must know, or at least suspect—even if Grandpa has handed her a spanking new bill—but she accepts it without demur. Bill spends a sorry sleepless night, dreading the inevitable interrogation in the morning. Why had he so easily succumbed to temptation, with no clear idea what to do with the money? And Mame was never one to overlook his misdeeds—This is for your own good!—even the ones Grandpa sometimes took the fall for, like pilfering cookies from the pantry.

And yet, the next morning Mame says nothing, handing him his lunch with only a soft look of reproach. Still he cannot work up the courage to confess. He must seek out his grandfather and return the money to him.

It’s not much easier confessing to Grandpa. I can’t believe you would let her down this way, Grandpa says. How hard Mame worked, two jobs, and sometimes weekends too, to keep this house running, to make sure Bill would have a future. She’s beyond sad, and discouraged.

Bill hangs his head and promises then, the weight of the world on his tongue, never again to let Mame down, never again to take for himself the fruits of someone else’s labor.

3

That February morning at the protest, Bill is smitten. The woman is dressed to draw eyes—a spaghetti-strap scarlet dress, matched with scarlet lipstick, shocking like freshly spilled blood—and he is indeed transfixed. He gives her a ride to an urgent care center and waits with her, solicitous and apologetic, his face an echo of empathy at her grimaces of pain. Afterward, her foot braced and bound, he procures a crutch for her, and when she expresses a desire to return to the rally, he offers to accompany her.