He writes that he has been carrying that money for seven months.
Seven. Through a winter. In a backpack, on a street, with nowhere to put anything down.
He writes that it was for a bus — a particular bus, to a particular town four hours away, and that he had been going to get it on the Saturday.
That Saturday. Two days after my porch.
And then there is the fourth line, which is the one I have read about four hundred times and which I am going to put down as close to his words as I can manage.
He writes that he heard what I said at the door.
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.
