"The—the twenty-first." Cal took another step back. His heel hit the box. "Why are you—do you know my mom or something?"
The man's hand came up off the cane, reaching, and Cal flinched back, and the man must have heard it, because the hand stopped in the air and then slowly came back down and rested on his own knee, the fingers spread, trembling.
"I'm sorry," the man said. "I'm sorry. I've frightened you. I don't mean to. I'm—" He stopped. He pressed his lips together, and Cal saw his throat move. "What's your mother's name, son? Would you tell me that?"
Cal didn't answer.
From the front of the terminal, faintly, through the plywood passage, there came a commotion: a man's voice, loud, calling something, and the squeak of fast shoes on tile. And then Cal saw, through the big windows, out past the buses, on the side street where the cabs waited, a car pull up to the curb. It was the longest car he had ever seen in his life. It was black, shining black, so black the gray October sky slid along its sides like water. It had a ribbon of chrome down its whole length, and windows so dark you couldn't see in, and it was so long it took up the space of three cabs, and the cab drivers were standing beside their cabs staring at it.
The back door of the terminal banged open and a big Black man in a dark suit and a chauffeur's cap came through it at something just short of a run, and stopped, and looked down the length of the bench, and saw them.
"Mr. Calloway," the big man said. "Lord God. Mr. Calloway. You can't do this to me."
Cal stood there with his mouth open.
The man on the bench turned his face toward the big man's voice, and his shoulders, which had been up near his ears, came down an inch. "Booker," he said. "I'm sorry."
"Sorry. He's sorry." The big man—Booker—came the rest of the way down the room and stopped in front of the bench with his hands on his hips, breathing hard. He was huge, as wide as a doorway, with gray at his temples and a face that looked like it had been made for laughing and was currently being used for something else. "I turn around to pay the man for gas, I turn back around, the back door's open and you're gone. Gone. A blind man, in the middle of downtown, in the middle of a Saturday. I've been driving around this city for forty-five minutes. I been to the Point. I been to the store. I was about to call the police. Mrs. Petrakis is going to have my head."
"I took a cab," the man said. "I told the driver where to go. It's not complicated, Booker. I'm blind. I'm not a parcel."
"Mm-hm." Booker looked at Cal for the first time. He looked at him for a while, at the knapsack and the box and the sneakers with the tape on the toe, and his face did something complicated. "And who's this?"
"This," the man said, "is the young man who picked me up off the floor. Some fellow knocked me down by the construction. Knocked the watch right out of my coat. He found it for me. And brought me here." He paused. "His name is Calloway."
Booker went very still. He looked at the man on the bench and then back at Cal, slowly, and he took off his chauffeur's cap and held it in both hands.