It was strange, being named something nobody else was named. There were three Michaels in his grade and two Jasons and a Christopher and a Kristofer, and then there was him: Calloway Dunn, which on the first day of every school year made the teacher pause at the roll and look up, trying to figure out which kid in the room could possibly be a Calloway. He'd learned to say "Cal" before they finished reading it.
He'd asked his mother once, when he was eight or nine, where it came from. Was it a family name? A grandfather?
"No," she'd said. She'd been ironing. "It was a man I met once."
"What man?"
"Just a man. Somebody who was kind to me when he didn't have to be." She'd gone on ironing, the iron hissing and thumping on the board. "I thought, if I have a boy, I want him to have a name that means that. So whenever anybody says it, it'll be like they're saying it."
"Saying what?"
"Saying kind." She'd put the iron down on its heel and looked at him. "That's all. It's a good name. Don't let anybody make fun of it."
"Who was he?"
"Cal." She'd picked up the iron again. "Some things belong to the person they happened to."
He hadn't asked again. But he'd thought about it, on and off, the way you think about a door in a house you've lived in forever that you've never opened. You stop seeing it. And then one night you're lying in bed and you see it again, and you wonder where it goes.
* * *
The Greyhound terminal on Liberty Avenue was low and long and the color of old teeth, with a curved front of glass block and a blue running dog over the doors that had lost part of its tail. Inside, on a Saturday at noon, it was everything his mother had said. It was a zoo. It smelled like diesel and floor wax and popcorn from the snack bar and cigarettes from everywhere, and the noise came at you from all sides at once: the loudspeaker calling departures in a voice like a man talking through a tin can, babies crying, a soldier and his girlfriend arguing in whispers by the lockers, the clatter of the big board over the ticket counter as it flipped its letters, clackclackclackclack, every time a bus came or went. There were plywood walls up along the east side where they were redoing something, with a hand-lettered sign taped to them that said PARDON OUR DUST—GATES 5–8 THIS WAY with an arrow, and the arrow pointed at a narrow passage where everyone was jammed together, going both directions at once, with suitcases.
Cal found the package express window around the back, past the restrooms. There was a line. He stood in it for twenty minutes behind a woman with a birdcage covered in a dish towel. When he got to the window the man looked at his yellow slip and went into the back and came out with a cardboard box that had once held Del Monte peaches and now said DUNN—PGH—HOLD FOR PICK UP in Aunt Bev's big round marker letters, tied up with about a mile of twine.
"Sign here," the man said. "You eighteen?"