* * *
On Saturday morning she was up before him, dressed, not in her smock but in her good blouse, the blue one, and her car coat. She had the card in her hand.
"Get your coat," she said. "And your bag."
They took the bus downtown without talking. Cal had called Iannelli's on Wednesday and left a message with Mr. Iannelli for Booker—Tell him I can't come anymore—and Mr. Iannelli had looked at him over his glasses and said, "This is your choice or somebody else's?" and Cal had said, "It's right," which wasn't an answer, and Mr. Iannelli had let it go. So Cal didn't know what they'd find.
What they found, when they came out of the plywood passage into the back hall of the terminal, was Mr. Calloway on the bench.
He was sitting at the Seven end, under the clock, the way he always did. But there was no Booker by the lockers this time, no newspaper, no hat on the seat beside him. Just the old man in his camel coat with his cane between his knees, very straight, facing the windows. His face had the gray, closed look it had had the first day, before the curtains.
His mother stopped walking.
She stood just inside the passage with her hand on Cal's shoulder, and Cal felt her fingers dig in. She was looking at the bench. At the man, and the clock above him, and the green floor with its black squares. And he saw her face change—saw it go young, somehow, and frightened, like a girl's.
"That's where I sat," she said, so quietly he almost didn't hear. "The other end. Right there."
Then she let go of him and walked across the room and sat down on the bench. Not at the far end. Next to the old man. Close enough that her coat touched his sleeve.
Mr. Calloway's head came around.
For a moment neither of them said anything. Cal stayed back by the passage. Out in the bays a bus pulled in and sighed.
"You told me," his mother said, "that the Columbus bus was the one at nine-fifteen. You couldn't see the board. You asked me to read it to you and I did and then you told me which bus. Like you'd known the whole time."