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
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.
