"It's for my mom."
The man looked at him. Then he looked at the line behind him, which went out the door. "Sign her name, then," he said, and Cal did, with the loop on the D.
The box was heavy. Not too heavy, but awkward, wide enough that he couldn't see his feet over it. He hitched the knapsack higher on one shoulder and got the box up against his chest and started back toward the front doors, toward the bus stop on Liberty, going slow, turning sideways to get through people.
He was halfway down the main concourse when he saw the man.
Afterward he would try to figure out what it was that made him notice, in all that crowd. Part of it was that the man was standing still, and nobody else was. Everyone else was moving, pushing, dragging, hurrying, and this man was standing in the middle of the floor near the mouth of the plywood passage like a rock in a creek, with the water going around him on both sides. Part of it was how he was dressed. He wore a long camel-colored overcoat, the kind that looked soft from across the room, and a gray felt hat, and leather gloves, and his shoes were black and shined so bright that Cal, who had spent a lot of afternoons that fall looking at shoes, knew without thinking about it that they cost more than the rent. Nobody in the Greyhound terminal on a Saturday dressed like that. People who dressed like that went to the airport.
And part of it was the cane. It was white with a red tip, and it was moving back and forth in front of him in short arcs, tapping, finding the floor, finding a trash can, finding someone's suitcase, which the owner yanked away with a look. The man's head was tilted a little to one side. He was wearing dark glasses, though they were inside, and he was turning his face this way and that, slowly, like someone trying to hear a radio station through static.
As Cal watched, a big guy with a duffel bag on his shoulder came barreling out of the passage and caught the man on the arm, hard, and spun him half around. The man staggered. The cane skittered out of his hand and went clattering across the floor, and something else fell too, out of the man's coat, and hit the tile with a small bright sound and slid.
"Watch it, pal," the guy with the duffel said, and kept going.
The man stood there with both his hands out a little from his sides, the gloves open, not reaching for anything. Just standing. People went around him. A woman stepped right over the cane.
Cal put the box down.
He put it down right there in the middle of the concourse, which you weren't supposed to do, and he went and picked up the cane, and then he looked for the other thing. It had slid almost to the wall by the drinking fountain. It was a pocket watch, gold, round, on a short gold chain, the kind of thing Cal had only ever seen in movies. The case had popped open when it hit. Inside the lid, under a little round of glass, there was no picture. There was just a pressed flower, or what had been a flower once—something small and flat and brown, with a few faded petals—and the face of the watch had no glass over it at all, just the hands, out in the open.
He snapped it shut and brought it back.
"Mister," he said. "Here. You dropped your cane. And this."
The man turned toward his voice. Up close he was older than Cal had thought from across the room, maybe sixty, with a long face and deep lines on either side of his mouth and a lot of white hair under the hat. His skin was very pale, like someone who didn't go outside much. He held out one gloved hand, palm up, and Cal put the cane in it, and the hand closed on it. Then he held out the other one, and Cal put the watch in that, and the man's fingers closed around it so hard the knuckles stood up through the leather.