Brenda slowly opened her right hand, her palm held out flat and shaking.

I let the bill drop onto her skin.

The green paper lay there motionless, the fifty-dollar bill resting in Brenda’s shaking hands.

I turned my back on her trembling fingers and walked out through the glass doors of the station into the autumn wind.

Two weeks later, my sister Sarah held a wooden stir stick over a gallon of latex paint on the newspaper-covered floor of her spare room.

“It looks a lot brighter than that little paper sample,” Sarah said, tapping the stick on the inside of the rim.