the silence she prefers to contact — "Joelle gives him a folded U.S…"
Joelle gives him a folded U.S. twenty and likes that he says nothing.
Context
Contact is bearable to her only in its most reduced forms: she prefers the blunt indelicacy of strangers asking straight out about the veil to any tactful circling, and from the silent wheelchaired beggar she prefers, best of all, no words at all. What she can tolerate of other people is the exchange that asks nothing of her interior, a coin for a silence, so that the nearest thing to connection she wants on her last walk is the one that leaves her sealed.