PAUL FAUSTINO BLUFFED his way out through the fiendish glass doors by concealing himself inside a small knot of other employees, and to celebrate this small triumph, he lit a cigarette, hunching his shoulders over the flame. A chilly evening wind eddied around the patio; the ornamental trees dipped and shook their heads. A plastic bag wallowed through the air like a jellyfish. Something attached itself to his ankle: a flier for the New Conservative Party, bearing the slogan A CLEANER TOMORROW. Faustino flipped it off, although, usefully, it reminded him that his cleaner hadn’t shown up yesterday. He went down the steps to get into the lee of the wind and saw Bush slooshing his wash bucket into the gutter.

The kid had been out of sorts lately. Nothing that Faustino could put his finger on, but something like a shadow had settled over the boy. He hadn’t been quite the same since he’d disappeared for three days a while back. The smile and the eagerness were still there, but somehow less authentic than they used to be. And now, when he looked up and saw Faustino, his greeting was flat.

“Maestro.”

“How’re you doing, Bush?”

“Pretty good.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Kinda cold today, though.”

“Well, maybe you should be wearing more than just that T-shirt, you know? Don’t you have something else you could put on?”

“It wasn’ so cold when I come out this morning.”

It was an answer of sorts. But Faustino felt stranded. Bush held on to his bucket, shuffling his feet a bit, glancing right and left.

“Hey, c’mon, Bush. What’s up?”

The boy shrugged.

“And don’t just do that shruggy thing.”

“Well, you know, Maestro. Woman problems.”

Faustino laughed. He couldn’t help himself. “What, all your girls fighting over you?”

“Not exackly.”

Faustino could not tell from the boy’s body language whether he was anxious to go or had something he wanted to talk about. Possibly both, or neither. With an awkward jocularity, he said, “So, d’you have a girlfriend, Bush? I bet you do.”

“Nah. A sister an’, uh, like another girl with us. Tha’s trouble enough.”

Faustino had wondered, of course, about the boy’s life. Whether he was alone, where he slept at night, what he did with his paltry earnings. He knew that street kids often formed themselves into small clans, established territories, protected each other, operated a harsh kind of communism whereby they shared whatever they could steal or scavenge. Memories of his own childhood — a suburban childhood that had been solitary and frequently anxious, but ordered and comfortable — could not help him to imagine such a way of life. And, in truth, he shied away from imagining it, just as he avoided actually seeing it. He knew that he was not strong enough to cope with his helplessness in the face of it.

For some reason he did not think that Bush was a member of a clan. The boy seemed too . . . independent, was that the word? Or was it unprotected? But the mention of a sister and another girl was a glimpse into his life. A kind of offering.

“So, uh, you look after them, do you? Your sister and the other girl?”

“Kind of. Mostly they look after each other.”

“Right.” Not knowing what to say next, Faustino dropped his cigarette butt and ground it under his foot.

“Time to go,” Bush observed. “Things to meet, people to do.”

Faustino smiled. “Yeah. You could say that.”

Bush’s skin looked grayish and puckered. Faustino realized that the boy’s restlessness, his fidgeting, was a way of concealing the fact that he was shivering. He reached into his inside jacket pocket and took out his wallet. He found a twenty, folded it lengthwise, and held it out. Bush looked at it but didn’t move.

“Take it. Buy yourself a sweatshirt or a hoodie or something, okay? Something warm.”

Bush pulled his gaze from the bank note and glanced toward the avenue. A woman walking to her car grimaced and turned her face away.

“Bush?”

“You wan’ me to get in your car with you?”

“What?”

The boy looked back at Faustino but did not meet his eyes. “For the twenny. You wan’ me to come to your car with you?”

It took perhaps three seconds for Faustino to understand the question; then his hurt was so deep, so shocking, that before he could think of anything to say, he had already hit the boy. The slap made a wet sound that was audible above the noise of the traffic; Faustino’s hand registered the shape of teeth through the flesh of the boy’s cheek.

Bush stumbled backward. He dropped the plastic bucket, made as if to retrieve it but did not; the wind tumbled it away. Then he was gone, running awkwardly, an erratic shadow in front of the oncoming headlights. The fallen twenty-dollar bill was plucked up by invisible fingers, dangled briefly above Faustino’s head, and then thrown into the slipstream of the hurtling cars. The cry of pain that seemed to linger in the air was not the boy’s. It was Faustino’s.