His mother wiped her face with the heel of her hand.
"I came to the store," she said. "In 1980. After I moved back. I'd been cleaning there three weeks, nights, in the Calloway's building, before I even put it together, and then I saw your name on a door. And one day I came in the daytime in my good clothes to find you and say thank you, and I saw you come out of the elevator with a man holding your arm, with the cane, and everybody stepping back for you—" She shook her head. "And I looked down at myself and I thought, he won't even remember. I'm the cleaning lady. And I went back out on Fifth Avenue and I never went back."
"I'd have remembered," Mr. Calloway said.
"I know that now."
"I'd have remembered," he said again, and reached out his gloved hand, not quite toward her, just into the air between them, the way he had with Cal on the first day. And this time nobody flinched. His mother took it in both of hers and held it on the bench between them, and the clock over their heads said five minutes later than it really was, and out the windows the Columbus bus pulled into its bay and sat there, rumbling, with the door open, waiting for anyone who needed it.
* * *
The black limousine came up Brereton Street the following Sunday at two o'clock in the afternoon, and every curtain on the block moved.
Mr. Wozniak came out on his porch in his undershirt. Mrs. Washington put down her watering can. Outside Pulaski's, Travis Kolb's big brother took his cigarette out of his mouth and forgot to put it back. Booker got out and came around and opened the back door, and Mr. Calloway climbed out in his camel coat with his cane, and stood on the cracked sidewalk turning his face toward the sound of the church bells at Immaculate Heart.
"Third floor," Cal said from the stoop. "There's forty-one steps. The rail's loose on the second landing."
"Then I'll hold your bag," Mr. Calloway said.
He climbed all forty-one with his hand on the canvas strap, stopping on each landing to breathe, waving Booker off when Booker tried to take his elbow. At the top he stood in the kitchen doorway, red-faced and triumphant, and Rosie, who had been told who was coming and had decided to be shy about it, lasted about four seconds before she said, "Are you really blind? Can you see anything? Can you see me?" and Mr. Calloway laughed so hard he had to sit down.
They sat at the kitchen table on the oilcloth, under the overhead light. His mother had made coffee in the percolator and put out a plate of the poppy seed rolls from the bakery that she must have spent three dollars on. Mr. Calloway didn't try to give her anything. Cal watched him not try. He saw how careful the old man was being, the way he kept his hands folded on the table where she could see them.
"I'm not going to insult you," Mr. Calloway said finally. "I know what you'd say."