"East Sixth Street," Eamon said. "Lawrence Park. I know. It was on the envelope. I meant—" He stopped, and rubbed his face with one hand. "I meant it's raining. It's coming down sideways, and you don't have a hat that stays on, and the next bus is twenty minutes, and you're eighty-one. I have a car. That's all this is. I'm not— This isn't anything. It's a ride."
I watched the old man understand what was being offered, and I watched him understand exactly how much it was being offered and how little, and I watched him decide to take only the little, because that was what was in the hand held out to him and he did not have the right to take more. I have never respected anyone more than I respected him in that moment.
"Thank you," he said. "Just a ride."
It took us a while to get him across the street. Eamon held the umbrella over him and I walked on his other side, and the light changed twice while we were in the crosswalk, and a woman in a minivan waited for us without honking, which in Erie is a small act of grace. Eamon opened the passenger door of the clean gray Honda and Virgil looked at the low seat with something like dread, and Eamon saw it, and without saying anything put one hand under the old man's elbow and the other flat against his back, between the shoulder blades, and lowered him into the car the way you lower someone into water. I saw his face afterward, as he shut the door. He looked like somebody who had picked up a pot without realizing the handle was hot.
I got in the back, next to the box of quilts.
We drove out Twenty-sixth to Bayfront and along the water toward Lawrence Park, past the gray lake with its whitecaps, past the shuttered Dairy Queen and the long brick shape of the locomotive plant. Nobody talked. Eamon did not turn on the radio. Halfway there I saw him reach for the knob out of habit and stop with his hand an inch away, and I knew that he had heard the part about the radio, too, standing outside the shelter before he came in.
Virgil lived on the second floor of a narrow house with green asbestos siding and a porch that sagged on one corner. There were moving boxes stacked on the porch under a blue tarp, and a recliner with a SOLD sign taped to it. Eamon pulled up in front and put the car in park and left the engine running and sat with his hands on the wheel at ten and two.
"Monday," he said, without turning his head. "Bayfront Manor. What time?"
Virgil, with his hand on the door handle, went still.
"I'm just asking."