I let an elderly homeless man sleep on my covered porch during a brutal summer storm. By sunrise, he was gone. But when I lifted the blanket he had carefully folded beside my front door, I found something hidden beneath the doormat with my name written across it.

I went to the front door.

"Good morning," I called, opening it.

Nothing came back.

I stepped out. The porch was empty.

The cushions were stacked. The towel was folded on top of them. The plate was washed — he had washed a plate, somewhere, with something — and set on the sill.

And the man was gone.

I stood there for about four seconds looking down the street in both directions, which was pointless, because the street was empty and had been for hours.

Then my foot caught something by the doorway and I nearly went over.

It was my mother's blanket.

Folded. Carefully — properly, in four, with the edges squared, the way somebody does a thing when they have decided it is the last thing they can do for you.

Set down square on the doormat.

I bent and picked it up.

And the mat shifted under my hand, because there was something flat underneath it.

My first thought was that he had dropped something out of that bag in the dark and not noticed.

And then I saw the writing on the front.

One word.

Nessa.

PART 3

I sat down on my own porch step with that envelope and I did not get up again for about eleven minutes.

Junie slept through all of it. The coffee went cold on the kitchen counter in two cups.

It was an envelope. Small, brown, soft at the corners from being carried. The kind that has been in a bag for a long time with other things.

Inside it there was money and there was one page.

Two hundred and twelve dollars.

A hundred-dollar note, two twenties, a ten, and the rest in fives and ones — with four of the ones so soft and so worn that they were nearly cloth.

I counted it three times sitting on that step in the wet. Not because I doubted it. Because I could not think of anything else to do with my hands.

That was not an amount somebody had left over.

Nobody has a hundred, two twenties and a ten by accident. That is an amount somebody has got to — in stages, over a long time, by not spending things.

And the page was four lines, in capitals, in pencil, on paper torn out of something.

He writes, in the first line, that it is not a thank-you for the dinner.

He is very clear about that. He underlines not.