I'm expecting coal.

From Alfred’s journal

The woman in the gray coat came back to the bench today with two bags instead of one, and she sat the way a person sits who has rehearsed something. Her sister was coming at four. For years I thought bracing was a kind of cowardice, a way of not looking, but I watched her lay out the sandwiches and the thermos and keep glancing at the path, and she was looking harder than anyone. I'm expecting coal, she said to nobody, or to me, and then she laughed at herself. The sister came at ten past and there was no coal in it at all, just the two of them talking over each other about a cousin. I do not know whether the waiting cost her the first five minutes of it, or bought them.