She asked her name. Adeline, my mother said. The register clicked shut. The belt went dead. Nobody leaves, she said, and then she called the manager over and whispered, and he came back with a cardboard box from the office.

Inside were forty years of letters. The cashier’s name was Delphine, and in 1983 she had been eleven and living in a shelter after a fire, and my mother had been the volunteer who came Thursday evenings and taught the children to read. She had written to Delphine every year afterward, on her birthday, until the address stopped working in 1996. Delphine had kept every envelope. She had also kept my mother’s face, which she said she would have known anywhere, at any age, in any light.

The manager comped the groceries and nobody asked him not to. The woman behind us left her trolley in the aisle and went out through the doors and I have never seen her since, and I have stopped caring where she went.

Delphine and my mother had lunch every second Thursday for the next six years. My mother died in February. Delphine sat with us at the front of the church and read one of the letters aloud, the 1989 one, in which my mother had written that she had no doubt at all what Delphine would become.

A stranger decided my mother was an inconvenience in a queue. Someone else looked at the same face and saw the whole of a life. We do not get to choose who is looking, only whether we keep being worth the look.