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
It was the ninth day before I went back to that shop and asked.
Gilda had known him about two years. He came in most days. He bought one thing at a time and he always paid and he never once asked her for anything.
She did not know where he slept. She did not know a surname. She had never asked him either, and she said so, and then she looked at the counter for a while.
