That he has been sitting under trees in this country for about four years. That people have given him food, and coats, and money, and that he is grateful for all of it and has never once been short of kindness.
But that in four years, nobody had said for both of us to him.
And that a woman doing her own arithmetic at two in the morning should not be the one who ends up short.
It is signed with a first name and nothing else.
Abner.
No surname. No address — which is a stupid thing to look for on a note from a man sleeping under a tree, and which I looked for anyway, twice, turning the paper over both times.
I sat on that step with two hundred and twelve dollars in my hand and the rain still coming off the gutter.
Because that money was not a gift.
A gift is something somebody has. That was a man’s entire plan.
Seven months of it.
Whatever he had been doing to get it — and I have thought about that a great deal, and I am not going to put my guesses in here, because they are only guesses and because he would not want them written down.
He had put it in an envelope. He had carried it in a bag. He had held that bag against his chest under a tree in a storm with both arms, which I watched him do through my own front window for about four seconds before I opened the door.
And then he spent four seconds at my door working out what I was, and he put it under my mat.
I want to be precise about what I understood on that step, because I did not understand all of it at once.
What I understood immediately was the money.
What took me until about the Sunday was the date.
I had read that fourth line four times on the Thursday and it had not gone in. I was looking at the money. Everybody looks at the money.
A bus, to a town four hours away, on a date he had chosen. A man does not save seven months for a bus ride to nowhere.
He was going to see somebody.
And on the Thursday night, with two days to go — after seven months, after a winter of it —
he put the whole thing under a stranger’s doormat and folded her blanket on top of it and walked off into the dark.
Because she had said six words to him in a doorway without thinking about them at all.
I did not sleep that night and I have not slept properly since, and the arithmetic has stopped entirely, which is its own strange thing.
Junie came down at about seven and found me on the step with a blanket in my lap and asked me whether the man had gone.
And I said yes, love, he’s gone.
She said: did he like the dinner.
And I said he did. He said thank you.
And then she said the thing that eight-year-olds say, which went straight through me and has stayed there.
“What was his name?”
PART 4
