He wasn’t, it was true. The limited scale of the human life startled Diane. There was so little actual time between ages that felt vastly different. She had categorized Jackie as different than Josh, and herself as different than Jackie, but the span of years between any two of them wasn’t much of a span at all.

“None of us knows what we want to do when we’re his age. When we’re your age, when you’re my age,” said Diane, “any age, I guess. We think we do, and sometimes we’re right, but only ever in retrospect.”

Her tone was halfway between reminiscence and lecture. Jackie sighed but let her talk. She knew that messages were for the sender, not the receiver.

“Troy and I loved each other. We called it ‘unconditional love,’ which was true. Once conditions arose, the love dissipated.”

“Everything that’s happened has gotten me thinking about a lot of stuff I’ve tried hard to not think about. Like, I’ve never loved anyone,” said Jackie. “Not that I can remember. I know this town, but I don’t feel like I’m on the same time scale as it. Something went off.”

“Love is hard,” said Diane, who hadn’t really listened to what Jackie had said. “I wish Josh could love his father conditionally.”

“The kid is smart. He’ll know what to do.”

“How old are you, Jackie? If you don’t mind.”

“Nineteen, I guess.”

“You guess?”

“I don’t feel nineteen.” Jackie looked out the window at the houses across the street that were thinking nothing at all. “A woman who calls herself Mom asked me about stuff from when I was a kid, but I couldn’t remember any of it. People think I’m a child, but if so, I’ve been a child for a long time. I don’t know how old I am.”

Talking about this made Jackie feel like she was looking down from somewhere high, or like she was staring straight up at a cloudless point of sky.

“People look at me and call me a girl or tell me I’m too young to run a pawnshop. They wonder how I’m able to handle a tough business like that, and I don’t know. I just do. Always have. It’s the only thing I know how to do. Far as I can tell I’ve been doing it for centuries.”

“Well, when you’re nineteen, everything feels like forever,” Diane said, staring at the dash and lightly touching the air-conditioning vent. “I don’t know. Did you ever think of just turning twenty?”

“I gotta go,” Jackie said.

“Okay.”

“Meaning this is my car.”

“Right.”

Diane grabbed her belongings.

“Hey,” she said. “I said I was going to let you ask the questions at Leann’s, and then I didn’t let you. That wasn’t right of me.”

“Guess we all suck sometimes.”