When 6PM rolled around, Arthur stretched and then took off his stained white apron as he walked out of the kitchen, and then out from behind the busy counter, and walked down the counter to the little hallway beyond it to his left. He brushed by a customer leaving the bathroom behind him and knocked on a door to the right.

“What’s it?” he heard from behind the door.

Arthur opened and cracked to the door and looked in at Mr. Piedman, a thin black man in a gray fedora and a green collared shirt behind a cluttered desk.

“It’s time, if that’s okay, Mr. Piedman.”

“Art- are you really going to do this?”, Mr. Piedman yelled, eyes wide and challenging. Mr. Piedman’s gruff response spilled over into a loud chuckling.

“Arthur- get out of here. How long has it been? I’ve never seen you not be here when we needed you.”

Arthur began to back out of the doorway after Piedman looked back down at his desk, but then he heard- “Hey, come here. Take this.” Piedman stood up and extended his long arm at Arthur. It was $10 bucks.

“You ain’t gotta do that, Mr. P.”

“It ain’t nothing. Take it- and get out.”

Arthur took the crumpled apron in his hand and let it fall towards the floor as he held the neck strap, and then he folded it once vertically and rolled it up.

Behind Piedman’s office was an everything room with cleaning supplies, a sink, a wall of canned goods, and a section on the wall with open compartments where employees stored their belongings. Arthur pulled a paper bag out of a cube on the top right of the section, and replaced it with his apron.

He went into the bathroom and replaced his white work shirt and paper cap with a clean blue and brown buttoned-down, and an old dark brown vest. He had a few small stains on his light tan slacks and he cursed them and shook his head a moment while he tried to clean the stains off at the sink. But it was all he had, and he didn’t have time to mess with them. He rolled the sleeves of his shirt down over the unreadable lines etched into his dark arms, and stretched and straightened the vest.

Arthur made sure his short graying hair was combed and his shirt was tucked in, and then he went back into store room and reached up into the cube next to where his apron was, and removed an old messenger bag and a brown collared jacket from the compartment. The clock on the wall over the mops said 6:17, so Arthur slid his jacket on and slung the bag over his shoulder and left the storeroom and its little entryway, and headed back across the restaurant’s busy floor staying by the counter.

Martha came out of the kitchen with a tray of chicken fried steak and turkey plates, and seeing him she stopped, put her free hand on her hip, stuck her lower lip out in a pout, and then winked at him. A few years younger than he, she had been working there just a year less than he had, and she knew the story. She then broke into a warm smile and winked at him again after he nodded at her, and she went around him toward a far away booth.

Arthur took a deep breath and then went up to the hostess podium next to the “Please Wait To Be Seated Sign”. Octavius, an energetic kid with a big fro, turned and saw him in his street clothes and was befuddled. “You can’t leave yet, man- this place don’t run without you! You okay? You feeling alright, Arthur?”

Arthur smiled and patted him on the back and said “I’m good.”

“I hope so, brother”, the kid said as he backed up to find his bus bin. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Once outside, the gold light on the window of the tall bank building next door hurt his eyes. It had to be 6:20 by now, and he had to catch the 12 in 10 minutes if he wanted to get out there before it got too late. The air was cool so he popped his coat collar up to try and block it from nipping his neck, but one side was dog-eared and didn’t help much.

Arthur moved on anyways, slipping into the stream of people coarsing along Main Street, each intent on getting to where they needed to be next. The traffic moved slow in the road beside them, and he let the crowd push him from Albany Avenue to Murdoch Avenue three blocks away. It always pushed you at this time of day.

At Murdoch, he turned south, and halfway down the block, before he entered the station for the underground, he broke off into the popular five-and-dime, and several minutes later emerged, putting a box into his messenger bag. And then he followed the throng entering the subway station.

In the push of people he heard trains coming and going and he gripped his bag and got to the D tunnel in time to press into the mass at one end as the 12 rolled in. Doors swished open and he pushed his way into the packed car at the back of the train.

His heart had been beating hard as he worried about missing the connection and walked frantically to catch it. He relaxed a little and held onto his overhead loop and looked through the bouffant billows of the gal in front of him at the wall seams in the dark as the train clacked forward, and then stopped, and then started again, and then stopped.

Soon the car rose out from out of the ground and ascended onto a platform, and around it were blocky two story houses and lines of green trees. The sun was setting, and the car was still full, but no one leaned against him. As the light began to switch in dusk, the train continued straight ahead, away from the tall buildings behind them downtown, and deeper into neighborhoods he did not know. A few teenage boys laughed near him and stared at a blonde girl in a dress up the aisle from them. Around them were many couples clutched close together, heading out into the suburbs for a romantic dinner at Bella Nina’s in Washton.

Arthur held his loop and stared out at the neighborhoods and thought about all the people that had to live in them, and about nice houses and nice things and metallic things like silver and gold that nice people had, and about his nephew Marcus getting shot, randomly, last year in front of Chan’s cleaners, when he was tying his shoe and nine and didn’t do nothing mean to no one.

He also thought about living in that sewer of a neighborhood he grew up in, where it was all public housing and smelly water, peddlers, pimps, and thugs, and single mamas who got trapped in the cement walls because they ended up having those babies, and who cried at night wondering if they, or their children, would ever escape the gangsters and gunshots and midnight moaning.

He thought about his own escape because of the army, and of the places they had sent him, and of the things he had ended up seeing because of them, including the things he had seen men and women do when all of their hearts were gone.

Part of that is why, when he came home, he wandered for a year and ended up here, a drunk, and in prison for twice punching a woman in the head and robbing her because she would not sleep with him one night.

He did his time.

He did his time.

And in jail, he tried to clean up.

After an hour of stops and starts, Arthur started feeling nervous again. He knew the stop was somewhere near, and so he moved toward the closest exit door to eye the routes map above it. They had just been in Sheffield. He was looking for the Proust Station, and he saw that it followed the one ahead. His hands were a little sweaty. He had not been out in the suburbs this far except once, for a picnic with an aunt and uncle at White Lake. And he certainly had had no reason to be out in these neighborhoods before. These weren’t his people. These weren’t his kind of houses.

Well, most of them weren’t.

When the train wheeled in at Proust Station, the last light of the day flashed on the western horizon, and he and a handful of people disembarked. At the back of the platform, he walked forward to where a staircase took him down onto the street below, a street with recessed white boxy homes cool under a canopy of tall ash and elder trees.

At the base of the staircase, Arthur pulled a corner of a yellow sheet of paper from his pocket that had hand scribble on it. Two blocks to the right, then left and three house down on the left. 314 Moreside.

Arthur looked right and walked, slowly at first as his tired legs loosened, until he descended into and came out of a long dip. He crossed the quiet neighborhood street and walked another block in the gray cool until he came to the second intersection. A car pulled beside him, and he waited as it passed through the intersection, and then he crossed the street. He could make out Moreside on the sign in thin authoritative letters. A breeze pushed the smell of glazed ham by him- coming from some family eating dinner somewhere nearby.

He passed the first driveway, and then a second, that had a mailbox with 312 on it, and soon he stood in front of the house.

The house was a modest two story brown brick structure, closer to the road. It’s lot was a little smaller than the others around it. The lawn was trimmed and clean. A light was on over the porch beyond the several steps reaching it.

Arthur swallowed hard and held his bag close to him, and looked up and down the quiet street. He then walked up the short driveway to the walk to the stairs, and then he climbed the steps.

He heard his heart beat, and standing still in front of the door, he opened the flap on his bag, and took out a box long red thin box wrapped in cellophane. In the porch light, he saw the image of the bowl of chocolates on it. He closed the bag flap, and held the box by his side with his right hand. With his left hand, he briefly opened and reached into his jacket breast, and pulled a glossy paper from its breast pocket, which he also put in his right hand.

He thought it was probably about 8 and maybe too late to knock on the door. After all, he wasn’t here any more, and she was alone now, and she didn’t know him, and was odd in this neighborhood. But maybe she knew about him.

And he was here now.

An illuminated doorbell button was on the right, so he paused for a moment.

And then pressed it. Twice.

He stepped back and waited, and soon, he heard soft shuffling near the door.

And it partially opened.

Behind it showed a stately looking, middle-aged woman with glossy blue eyes in a blouse under a blue robe.

“May I help you?”

“M-Mrs. March?”

“Yes?”

“Mrs. March”, he said quietly, ” you don’t know me, but…”

She looked at him.

“But I am Arthur Delford.”

“Your husband helped me get in and through the restart program after I got out of
the muni jail sixteen years ago.”

She looked at him a little more closely as he continued speaking.

“And he gave me a job in his warehouse downtown on 32nd after that.”

“I was a bad man at that time, Mrs. March. And he helped me find my feet.”

“Uh, oh, Arthur”, she said as her eyes fell towards the ground.

“Your husband gave me some feet, Mrs. March.”

She looked back up at him with a tear running down her cheek, silent.

“I wanted to come and give you my regards, Mrs. March. I heard about the accident and I was broken when I learned it was him that died last month.”

As she looked at him, it was quiet and still, and he looked at her and nodded.

“I ain’t staying long, Mrs. March. I just wanted to drop these off to you for Valentine’s Day- I know he would have brought you something real nice, and would want you to have these from him.”

“And I wanted to get this back to you.”

Arthur lifted the box of candy toward the front door, with the square paper on top of it.

It was an old picture of a young Mr. and Mrs. March and their son, who at the time of the picture was five, and died from illness a year later. They were smiling, sitting close together.

“He gave it to me when I was in the program, and asked me to keep an eye on you all. In prayer.

Mrs. March looked at the picture for a moment, and then looked as if she would collapse, but she recovered and lifted her head up and laughed an uncomfortable laugh as she wiped her eyes.

“Thank you for letting your husband help people like me, Mrs. March. I am infinitely grateful.”

“Arthur, he was always helping people like me too.”

“Thank you for keeping an eye on us, Arthur. Would you like to come in for some tea?”