I did not know.
I had to stand in my own hallway, holding a folded blanket, and tell my eight-year-old daughter that I did not know the name of the man who had slept on our porch.
I had been out of that front door to him four separate times.
She was not upset about it. She just said oh and went and got her cereal, which was worse.
Because I never asked.
He asked me. He stopped me at the door, in the rain, and asked what my name was, and he nodded twice when I told him, like a man filing it somewhere safe.
And I said Nessa, and I turned round, and I went inside.
I did not ask him. Not when I handed him the cushions. Not when I handed him the towel or the plate. Not at any point in about eleven minutes of standing on a porch with him.
I gave that man four things off my own shelves and I did not give him the one thing that costs nothing.
And I have had eleven weeks to work out why I did not ask, and the answer is not complicated and it is not flattering, and it took me about four of those weeks to be willing to write it down.
Because asking his name would have made him a person I knew.
Not a man in a storm. Not a situation that ended when the rain did. A person, with a name, in my neighbourhood.
And a person I knew on a Thursday is a person I might have to think about on a Friday, and a Saturday, and in about four weeks’ time when it was cold again.
I had eleven dollars of slack a month and an eight-year-old and a job and two in the morning.
I did not have room for a person. I had room for one night, and I gave him an extremely good one night, and I made absolutely sure that was where it stopped.
So I gave him the blanket instead.
And the cushions, and the towel, and the hot plate with four extra potatoes on it.
Which is what you give somebody when you have decided — without ever once putting it into words, without ever admitting it to yourself at a window — that you would much rather be kind to them than know them.
And it goes further than one question at a door.
I had four days.
That is the part that keeps me up now, and it has replaced the arithmetic entirely.
He was not gone. Not on the Friday, and not on the Saturday either — because he did not get on that bus, obviously, because he had given me the fare.
He was somewhere within about four miles of my own front door for the best part of a week.
He was buying one coffee a day from a shop at the end of my road.
And I had two hundred and twelve dollars of his money in a drawer in my kitchen, under the takeaway menus.
And what I did was put it in the drawer.
I told myself I would ask around at the weekend.
I told myself that on the Friday. And again on the Saturday, in a car park. And by the Monday I had told myself four separate times, in four separate places, each time with complete sincerity.
And on the Tuesday Junie went back to school, and there was a thing with her shoes, and the week went the way weeks go when you have eleven dollars of slack in it.
I did not go looking for that man for nine days.
Not a shelter. Not a telephone call. Not one conversation with one person.
Nine. I have counted them and I have checked them against a calendar and it is nine.
And it goes further still, and this is the one I would most like to leave out.
On the Friday morning — the morning after, with the envelope still in my coat pocket — I went to the corner store on the end of our road for milk.
Gilda has run that place for about eleven years. She knows everybody on four streets and she talks to all of them.
And she said to me, over the counter, while she was getting my change: Was that Abner on your porch last night?
Six words, over a counter, the way you say a thing about the weather. No weight on it at all.
She said that man’s name. Out loud. To my face, by name, unprompted. At about eight in the morning on the Friday, with the money still in my pocket.
And I said something like oh — was that his name?
And Gilda said that’s him, and gave me my change.
And I took my milk and went home.
I did not ask her one single follow-up question.
Not where he sleeps. Not how long she has known him. Not whether anybody is looking for him. Not whether he has a surname.
Four questions. Any one of them would have done it.
I had the name. I had the woman who knew him. I had four days and his two hundred and twelve dollars in my coat pocket, about eleven inches from my own hand.
All three of those things, standing in front of me, in a shop, at eight o’clock on a Friday morning.
And I picked up a bottle of milk and went home and put it in the fridge.
PART 5
