“I’m here to do whatever needs doing,” Letty said, trying to hand the money back. “Please, I can’t take this.”

“Maya,” Arlene addressed the little girl. “Hold out your hand.”

“Okay.” The girl grinned as Arlene closed her chubby fingers over the cash. “You two run along now. And thanks a million.”

Letty had devised a system for completing the flyer mailing. She folded each flyer in three, inserted the rate card, affixed a preprinted mailing label to the front, then handed it off to Maya, whose sole responsibility was stapling the flyers together. The little girl chortled gleefully each time she mashed the glossy paper beneath the stapler.

Letty was so absorbed in her task she lost track of time until the door chimed again and Joe walked in, carrying a large cardboard carton. He glanced around the room. “Where’s my mom?”

“She had a dentist’s appointment and a coffee date. She said she’ll be back before lunch,” Letty said.

He walked around and joined them behind the counter, setting the box on a console table and ripping it open with a box cutter. He lifted out a bulky package wrapped in a plastic foam cube.

“I picked up her new printer,” he said, cutting away the foam. “I’m just gonna go ahead and set it up now, because otherwise I’ll have to come back and do it after I get off work tonight.”

“You’re on duty?” Letty asked. “Isn’t that against the rules or something?”

“We’re a small department. My sergeant knows where I am and he knows how to find me,” Joe said. He cleared a stack of file folders from the console top, set the printer up, and began plugging cables into the back of the printer, and then into the wall socket.

He tapped some buttons on the printer’s control panel and nodded in satisfaction when it lit up. “There’s paper on the shelf in the supply room,” he told Letty. “Grab a stack and let’s see how it works.”

She found the paper and inserted it into the printing tray. Joe sat at the computer monitor and typed, and a moment later the printer whirred to life.

“Good,” he said, nodding. He looked down at Maya, who was trying out the stapler on the discarded blocks of foam. “Hey, I recognize that table and chair.”

“Ava said they used to be your sister’s.”

“But they were mine first,” Joe said. “She used to sit me there while she worked. I watched a lot of television sitting at that table. Ate a lot of baloney sandwiches there too.”

“How nice,” Letty said. She picked up a stack of flyers and began folding them, hoping he’d get the signal that she was very, very busy.

“Where’d you grow up?” he asked. “I swear, just now when you said ‘How nice’ I detected a Southern accent.”