When the morning rain was pushed out by the cresting sun and a curtain of humidity fell over the plain, he had gone out to see about trimming some bushes down.

He was middle-aged and portly, too large, but his face was long and narrow under his brown thin-brimmed cap. His overalls held everything in, but his arms and hands always moved rapidly when he talked, and his smile was warm from his curveless face.

He had his trimmers moving in a smooth rhythm, whittling down the boxwoods that guarded the yard from the gravel driveway below the home’s elevated porch.

“Hey, mister, you got a nickel?”

The voice startled him, and he responded back without turning.

“What you need, son?”

“I hear you might let us borrow a nickel, or three cents even, for some bread and sugar and milk.”

He paused his work, and turned and looked toward the voice. There, a little down the driveway were two little figures.

“Who told you that?” His smile changed briefly to austerity as he waited for a response.

“Mrs. Millary, at the church help society.”

“She did, did she?” He huffed a bit, catching up on breath.

The speaking boy was fair-skinned but extremely dirty, his faded blue checked button-up with frayed collar folds spotted by purple and smeared with some mud down one side. His kid brother, three years younger, sat on the ground by the boy, his red hair shiny in the son, his white t-shirt tan as a corn stalk, his eyes slits, eyelids mostly closed as he tried looking up at the big man in the sunlight.

“Mrs. Millary said you helped poor people”, the kid brother said, squinting.

“”Yessir. And we can’t help it but we’re probably the poorest ones in the whole wide town.”

The younger boy was distracted by a rock by his foot that he had to pick up and pocket.

“Well, I’ll be”, the man said to himself, staring at the boys like an accountant checking numbers in a book. His meaty hands, sausage links with knuckles, rested over his belly as he stood and thought, and then looked up the street, on past the train tracks and the empty storefront by it, up the hill towards town.

The boys’ shoes were leather hand-me-downs, split soles on that younger one’s, shoe laces broken, tongues wagging sideways. The younger boy blinked his eyes harshly and picked his nose.

“Where’s your ma?”

“She’s in the hotel in town. She’s resting and waking up.”

“The hotel?” The man thought. What hotel? There isn’t a hotel in town that I’ve heard of.

“She told us to wait for her.” The squinty red head rubbed a fleshy nugget he had excavated on his streaked short pants.

“Where do you live?”

“We live in the house at the corner by the drugstore and the gas station, behind the flowers shop.”

“Mister, would you have a nickel?” The older boy’s face was red and looking down at the man’s shiny work boot toes. “Or an apple?”

“Yes, sir, maybe an apple?” the younger boy echoed with an exaggerated grin, aimed at nothing.

The house, by the drugstore. And the gas station. And the flower shop. The flower shop. That’s Marge’s place. That’s gotta be Marge’s place. And Red’s station is there, on the corner. Across the street is an empty lot. And across from it is Harston Drugs. And across from it is… Across from it is, Jarv Jansen’s place.

“You boys in that house painted yellow outside with two gaslights out front by the walk?”

“Yessir- that’s the one!” the squinty boy yelled, too loudly for a conversant standing close by, while looking at a car trundling by with a low growl. “That wagon has angry wheels!”

“Yessir. That’s the house we are staying in. Just till Mama gets back from the hotel.”

The man’s long thin face quivered and fell briefly to a frown as a bead of sweat rolled off his chin, but he reset it to a mild smile. He eyed the boys there before him on the street, scabby-kneed, sockless, soiled, and eyeing him back.

“Well, there ain’t no hotel in this here town- closest one is in Parkton, 4 miles down the hill there.”

“Mama’s in the hotel with the sleeping people! Mama fell asleep and we saw the shiny star man and the white shirt man take her to the hotel. She’s been there before!”, the redhead belched.

“Yessir. She’s been there before. She told us she has to go there sometimes to rest.”

Jarv Jansen was a solitary old codger who had lived in the yellow house for over thirty years, and he kept no family or visitors- and he had died 6 months ago in the fall, and the man knew that Jarv’s house, behind the veil of overgrown sumac and dogwood, was unoccupied.

“Where you boys from?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

“We don’t know, ‘cept that way”, the junior yelled, his free arm rising quickly to point behind him, separate from the orientation of his body, like a marionette awoken by a puppeteer.

The big man wiped his wet neck with one of his big paws, and he looked off to where the kid pointed- toward a big swath of fields south of town.

“Well, if Mrs. Millary sent you, you boys best come on up to the porch, and let me see if I can find a nickel for you, and maybe an apple.”

He turned and walked a slow amble up his driveway and rounded the shrubbery and went to the front door of his house, his hands hanging long and lifeless to his sides. The older brother with the stained blue shirt took the redhead’s hand and pulled him forward behind the man, the redhead lost in concentration on a bug sitting on a rock by the wide path.

The man opened the front door, and called inside. “Ella, could you come out here and take a look at these gentlemen who came to visit us? And could you make us some sandwiches? I think they might like one or two. And see if we got any apples.”