Joelle's last walk — "A sooty wheelchaired man with a…"
A sooty wheelchaired man with a dead white face below a NOTRE RAI PAYS cap silently extends a hand for coins—a puffed red cut across that businesslike palm is half-healed and almost visibly closing. It looks like a dent in dough. Joelle gives him a folded U.S. twenty and likes that he says nothing.
Context
A wheelchair under a Québécois-nationalist cap placed directly in Joelle's path the day before I-Day: read retrospectively this is A.F.R. surface in Boston, and read either way it's the theme's two systems — the veiled woman and the wheelchaired Québecer — silently transacting, each liking the other's discretion. (Cap text "NOTRE RAI PAYS" as written — possibly a dropped V.)