Mr. Calloway didn't move. Then he said, in a voice Cal had never heard him use: "I had known. I'd been looking at that board for six hours. I could see the big numbers. I just wanted to hear somebody talk to me."
His mother made a sound that wasn't a laugh and wasn't anything else.
"I was sixteen," she said. Not to Cal, not even really to Mr. Calloway. To the room. "My father put me out of the house on a Sunday afternoon in McKeesport with a knapsack and three dollars and twenty cents because I was seven months along and wouldn't say who. And I came down here because I didn't know where else, and I sat on this bench, and I didn't buy a ticket because I didn't have anywhere to buy one to. And about ten o'clock at night, this man sits down on the other end. Nice coat. Nice shoes. And he sits there, and he sits there, and he never gets on a bus, and every so often he takes out this bottle of pills from his pocket and looks at it and puts it back."
Mr. Calloway's hands were very still on the cane.
"And around midnight he asks me to read him the board. And I do. And then we start talking. Because what else are you going to do at midnight in the Greyhound station. And he tells me he's going blind. He tells me he's got a ticket to San Francisco in his pocket and he's not coming back, he's going to go somewhere nobody knows him so nobody has to watch, so his wife doesn't have to spend the rest of her life leading him around by the hand. He says it like it's a business decision. Like he's closing a store that's losing money." She stopped. Her voice was shaking. "And I got so mad. I was sixteen and I was so mad. I said, you've got somebody at home sitting up waiting for you, right now, tonight, and you're sitting in a bus station acting like you don't. I said, I'd give anything. I'd give anything in this world to have somebody waiting up for me. And you're going to throw it in the trash because you're scared of a cane."
"You called me a coward," Mr. Calloway said. "I believe the word was chicken."
"I was sixteen."
"You were right." He turned his face toward her. Behind the dark glasses, Cal saw, there were tears running down into the deep lines of his cheeks, and he didn't wipe them. "You were absolutely right. And then about four in the morning I went to the window and turned in my ticket to San Francisco and I bought you one to Columbus. Because you'd said you had an aunt in Columbus, and you didn't think she'd turn you away, but you didn't have the fare."
"And forty dollars," his mother said. "You put forty dollars in my coat pocket when I wasn't looking. I found it in Steubenville."
"And when you went to pick up your bag—"
"The buckle broke." His mother was crying now too, openly, with her hand over her mouth. "Right there on the step of the bus. The strap came loose, and everything was falling out, and the driver was yelling, and you got down on your knees on the floor of this place in your nice coat and you took the lace out of your own shoe and tied it on. And you walked me to the bus with your shoe flapping."
Cal looked down at the knapsack hanging from his hand. At the thin brown leather lace, cracked and dark, knotted through the brass buckle. He had looked at it every day of his life.
"I felt it," Mr. Calloway said. "That first day. When he let me hold the strap. I felt that knot and I thought, no, you're a sentimental old fool, there are a million knots in the world. And then he told me his name." He let out a breath that shook his whole body. "I asked yours. That night. On the step of the bus. You said Darlene. And I told you mine, and you said, Calloway, that's a funny name, and I said, well, it's the only one I've got, and the door shut and you were gone. I never knew if you got there. I never knew if the baby—" He stopped. "I went home in a cab with one shoe untied. Margaret was at the kitchen table. I told her I'd met a girl at the bus station who'd called me chicken. I told her everything. The next morning I flushed the pills and called the doctor and asked him to teach me how to be blind. I've had twelve years and ten months since that night, Darlene. Margaret had six of them with me. I owe every one of them to a sixteen-year-old girl with three dollars and twenty cents."