“Snooty?”

“Above average.”

“Young?”

“Younger’n me, younger than Madonna and Cher, maybe younger than JLo! But I think it was that damned fumbling with the wallet. Make ’em wait. It gets to me sometimes. They stand there with nothing to do all that time while I’m putting their stuff in boxes and bags. Why can’t they wake up and take out some money while they’re waiting? Good thing she didn’t have a … woodyacallit.”

“Charge card?”

“Mm. Anyway there’s jobs in White Plains that pay better.”

“Go for it.”

“Not me.”

She takes a sugar-covered cookie from a tray on the counter, breaks it, tosses some pieces into the plastic garbage can and nibbles the remainder.

“This is my last job, thank God.”

Bill and Harry are of the same generation and are easy with each other in a way that Harry has come to more frequently acknowledge. And yet Harry, who grew up in Maine and retained some of its curtness, only responds, “No money,” when Bill recommends the purchase of a bagel machine. And although Harry accepted Bill’s ideas about coffee to go and a second-hand espresso machine, they were not bringing in a lot of money so far.

Two nights a week, Harry takes some leftovers to the prison, two towns north. “Probably the guards eat most of it,” he complains. “I don’t care one way or the other, but with all I have to do I wish they would get into one of those trucks the taxpayers bought and come up here and get this stuff. I don’t deliver to anyone else.”

Harry’s way of dealing with his abundant generosity usually turns and twists on its way to irony. He also carries with him the old-fashioned, long-discredited but never replaced habit of agreeing with everyone. This is true even with the outrageously bigoted Sid Ostrum who comes in almost every afternoon, not to buy anything, but to push his opinions on Harry. One day it was, “The Germans, the Swedes and the Irish are getting smarter about immigration lately.” This was greeted by Harry’s noncommittal nod. Yet, the day Sid spoke loudly about the black basketball player with AIDS, “getting what he deserved,” Harry bristled and asked Sid if he could get him something. Ostrum, with a smirk, said, “Can’t afford it. Cheaper at the supermarket,” and he didn’t come back for a few weeks.