"It's warm," he said finally. "I'd forgotten it was warm."
In the doorway, Mrs. Petrakis put her hand over her mouth and went away fast toward the kitchen.
* * *
He came every Saturday after that. By the third week he could read Gorbachev without stopping and the curtains were open in the library and the front hall and the dining room, where Mrs. Petrakis now served them lunch at noon before Booker drove Cal home: soup and thick bread and sometimes spanakopita, which Cal had never had and which he ate so fast the first time that she wrapped up the rest in foil and put it in his knapsack, "for the little sister."
He learned things. He learned that Mr. Calloway's eyes had started going when he was forty, little by little, from the edges in, like a photograph burning from the outside. He learned that the old man could tell a quarter from a nickel by the ridges, and a five from a one only by how Booker folded them, and that he hated being helped into chairs. He learned that Mr. Calloway had wanted to be a painter when he was young, before the store, and had a whole room upstairs full of canvases he'd never shown anyone, and that he hadn't been in that room since 1975.
And Mr. Calloway learned things too, though Cal didn't always notice he was giving them away. That his mother worked nights. That his sister wanted to see the planetarium. That the radiator gave up every morning. That his shoes had tape on them. That there was a pink envelope under a sugar canister. Mr. Calloway never said anything when Cal let one of these things slip. He just listened, the way he listened to the buses, with his head tilted, and filed it away somewhere.
On the fourth Saturday, when Cal had finished the business section, Mr. Calloway took the gold watch out of his vest and held it in his palm.
"You asked about the flower," he said. "That first day."
"I didn't ask. I just saw it."
"You saw it." He pressed the catch, and the lid opened, and he touched the little brown flower under its round of glass with his fingertip, gently, the way he touched the hands to tell the time. "It's a forget-me-not. Margaret grew them on the kitchen windowsill, in winter, in a pot. When I came home—that morning in January—I walked in the kitchen door at six o'clock with nothing in my pockets but a refunded bus ticket, and she was sitting at the table. She'd been sitting there all night. She didn't say anything. She got up and picked one of those flowers and opened my watch and put it in, and closed it. And she said, 'So you remember where you came back to.'" He closed the lid. "She had it put under glass the next week. I've carried it every day for twelve years and ten months."
"Where did you go?" Cal asked. "That night?"
Mr. Calloway put the watch away.
"Ask your mother," he said gently.