Dara looked at her for perhaps one second. She took it all in. The outfit. The car. The face. The hands. She noticed, the way she noticed everything about a person in front of her, that the woman's hands were trembling, both of them, very slightly. She noticed that the woman was standing with her weight too far back on her heels, off balance on the slick ground. She noticed that under the anger in the woman's pale blue eyes there was something wet and glittering that might have been tears.
Then she turned her head back to the pump, and spoke, in a voice that was flat and quiet and completely without emphasis, the way you might speak to a waiter who has asked whether you are finished with your plate.
"I'm still fueling."
It was true. That was all it was. A statement of fact. The numbers on the screen were still climbing. Five point one gallons. Twenty-six dollars and two cents. She could not move her car while the nozzle was in it. Anyone could see that.
Behind her, Brooke Halston made a sound like a kettle coming to the boil.
She could not believe it. She could not believe the woman had barely looked at her. She could not believe the flatness of that voice, the utter indifference in it, as if Brooke were not even worth the effort of a proper answer. As if Brooke were a fly. As if Brooke were nobody. And she was so tired, so tired of being nobody, of watching her numbers fall and her emails go unanswered and her friends stop calling and her own face in the mirror grow smaller and paler and more frightened every day, and she was so close, so close to the one thing that might fix it, the meeting, the woman from Paris, nine o'clock, and this, this tall silent stranger in her stupid leather costume with her stupid gold-wrapped braids standing there filling her stupid ancient truck with cheap gas one drop at a time, was standing in the way. She did not even care. That was what Brooke could not stand. She did not even care.
Brooke came forward. Two more quick, slipping steps on the wet ground, closing the distance, her arms still waving. Her hands flew in the air in front of her, pointing at the pump, at the SUV, at the orange car, at her own chest, in sharp, jerky, disconnected movements, as if her hands were trying to say something her mouth could not get out fast enough.
"I don't care, hurry up!"
Her voice cracked high on the last word, so shrill it hurt the ears. Across the forecourt, at pump four, the man in the work truck winced. Inside the convenience store, Mr. Farouk looked up from his newspaper and frowned through the rain-streaked window.
Theo Navarro, standing between the islands with his milk and his bread, felt his stomach turn over. He knew this. He knew how this went. He had grown up on Linwood Avenue and he had seen it start in a hundred ways, outside a hundred stores and bars and bus stops, two people and an argument about nothing, a parking space, a place in a line, a look, and then the voices getting louder and the bodies getting closer and then something, somebody, crossing a line that you couldn't step back over. He took his phone out of his pocket. He did not decide to. His hand simply did it. He thumbed it open and turned on the camera and lifted it to chest height, and the little red circle at the bottom of the screen began to blink, and he did not even know he had done it until later, when he looked at his phone and saw a video he did not remember taking, forty-one seconds long, in his camera roll.
At pump one, Dara had not moved.
She had not answered, either. There was nothing to answer. I don't care, hurry up was not a question. It was not even really a demand, because there was nothing Dara could do to satisfy it. The pump would go as fast as the pump went. So she said nothing. She stood exactly as she had been standing, both hands resting on the grip of the green nozzle where it was locked into the side of the SUV, her weight centered, her eyes on the climbing numbers. Five point six gallons. Five point seven. She was aware of the woman beside her the way she was aware of an opponent across the ring before the round began, peripherally, completely, every movement registered and filed. She was aware of the rain on the back of her neck. She was aware of the young man in the black hoodie standing between the islands with his phone raised. She was aware of the man at pump four, and of