Chapter 69: The Far Side of Charter Street
He stood there for fifty-one minutes.
I counted because I was at the scanner, and the scanner puts a timestamp on every batch it starts and every batch it finishes.
Batch started 4:52. Batch ended 5:43.
He was there for both.
Charter Street is thirty-two feet across, including the parking on both sides.
There is a hydrant, a bus shelter with a torn advertisement for a dentist, and a laundromat that is not the one under my room.
He stood between the hydrant and the shelter, which is the only stretch of that sidewalk where you can see straight through our front glass to the counter.
I want to say what I did in those fifty-one minutes, which was nothing.
I did not go out.
I want that understood as a decision and not as an absence of one.
I did not stand in the doorway. I did not wave. I did not put a hand up.
I did not do the thing where you look and then look away so the person knows you have seen them.
I fed the scanner and I kept my eyes on the machine and I let him stand there.
I want to explain that, because from the outside it looks like coldness, and it was not coldness.
Twice in that fifty-one minutes I nearly went out.
Both times the thing that stopped me was the same sentence. A man standing on a sidewalk has not decided yet.
If I cross the street I have made his decision for him, and he will never know afterward whether he came or whether I fetched him.
He has had six years of people crossing streets at him.
Advocates, lawyers, a reporter from the county paper, a woman from an insurance company.
All of them came to him. All of them wanted something.
The only thing I had to offer him was the one thing none of them offered, which is a door that stays where it is.
So I scanned four hundred and eleven pages of somebody else's bond file.
I did not look up more than I could help.
At 5:20 he sat down on the bench in the bus shelter, under the torn dentist.
Four buses came.
He did not get on any of them.
At 5:43 the batch finished and I changed the tray.
When I looked up the bench was empty.
I locked up at six and stood on our side of the street for a minute, looking at the shelter.
There was a coffee cup on the ground by the bench leg, upright, empty, from the place on the corner.
I threw it away. It was probably his and it was probably somebody else's, and I will never know.
Wednesday, nothing.
Thursday, nothing.
Friday the eighteenth I did something, and I want it in the record because it was a mistake and I made it on purpose.
I typed a second letter.
Three lines.
It said the office is open Monday to Friday, nine to six, that I would be there, and that he did not need to say anything if he came in.
I put it in an envelope and addressed it and I got as far as my coat pocket.
Then I took it out at the mailbox on Delacy and Third at 4:14 in the afternoon.
I did not post it.
Because I had told him I would not write to him again.
He had asked me for that specifically. It was the only thing he ever asked me for.
A person who breaks the one promise she made because she is impatient is a person whose paperwork you cannot trust either.
I unfolded it and read it standing at the box.
The whole thing was about me.
It was three lines saying please.
I put it in the trash can outside the pharmacy.
Then I took it back out, because a letter with my name and address on it in a public bin is a stupid thing to leave behind.
I carried it home, burned the corner of it in the sink, and put the rest in the kitchen bag like an adult.
Saturday. Sunday.
I cleaned my room on the Sunday. It took forty minutes, because there is not very much in it to clean.
Monday the twenty-first of May, at 9:40 in the morning, the door opened while I was at the counter with a client's mother.
I did not look up. The door opens forty times a day.
The client's mother stopped talking in the middle of a sentence about her son's job.
I looked up.
He was standing just inside the door with it shut behind him and his boots on the mat.
He had taken his hat off, which I had not seen him do before.
He said, “I've got nineteen minutes.”