The waitress, Marie-Anne MacDonald, looked back at him and found herself hesitating. Normally she gave old bums the treatment they deserved. If they couldn’t pay they hit the street. You slipped one of them an old danish or a doughnut past its sell-by, and before you knew where you were you had a string of them hanging around the door expecting to be fed like dogs. It was her butt on the line and if Jack came in and saw her giving charity to any old scrounger it would certainly be her who’d get it in the neck. Okay, it wasn’t a great job, but it was a job. The shop shut at four so she had all afternoon to watch the soaps and then get ready to go out with Alan. Suited her fine, and she wasn’t going to lose it for a bum. Anyway, these people could work if they wanted to. They just didn’t want to. Look at her. She had to work didn’t she? Sure, she’d like to stand around all day drinking, but she came in here at seven-thirty every day to earn her crust, and she hated these Indian bums who thought life owed them a living. She let them in so she could take their money off them, the money they’d begged from some sucker, and then throw them out when they got comfortable. Marie-Anne sometimes wished she could teach the useless pigs that white people weren’t all one big welfare cheque.

At least that was the rule she lived by normally. This guy was different. When he looked at her just then, his black shiny eyes fixing her with a stare, there was no self-pity in them, no pleading or cajoling. More like defiance, as if he were ordering her to do something she knew she had to but had forgotten.

And she caught a strange scent from him, not of piss and liquor, but of a fresh wind and trees, the way washed sheets smell when they’ve been out on the line blowing in the spring breeze.

Made her think of when she was little and she and her father picnicked on the Bow River, way out of town. The mountains were like a jagged cut-out in the distance, and she would run through the pines, laughing as she fell in the long grass in the clearing between the trees. The smell was the same. Green, wet, fresh, delicious.

Marie-Anne, still looking into Calvin’s watery black eyes, put a hand absently into the refrigerated display case in the front of the counter, scooped eight cling-wrapped sandwiches into a bag and handed it to him.

Calvin took it, nodded to her and slowly, wearily, left the shop. She watched him go, transfixed as his hunched figure pushed the door open and shuffled past the window out of sight.