He was sitting in the bus shelter at the corner of Niagara and Amherst, the old kind of shelter with three walls of scratched Plexiglas and an NFTA schedule behind a cracked panel. The buses had stopped running at two; there was a hand-lettered sign taped to the Plexiglas that said so, already half covered by snow. Harper would not have seen him at all if Roman hadn't said, "Mom, there's a man," in the voice he used for things that frightened him, which was a smaller, flatter voice than usual.
She slowed. The wipers went back and forth. Through the snow she could see a figure on the bench, upright, very still, in a long dark overcoat and a gray felt hat with snow on the brim. There was a suitcase beside him, the old brown cardboard kind with leather corners, and something on his lap wrapped in a plaid blanket, something boxy, which he was holding with both arms the way you would hold a sleeping dog.
"Is he dead?" Roman whispered.
"No," Harper said. "Dead people don't hold on to things."
She did not know if that was true. She pulled the Country Squire over to the curb, half on the snowbank, and put on the flashers, which only worked on the left side.
"Stay in the car."
"Mom."
"Stay in the car, Roman. Lock the door."
The wind off the river hit her like a door. She waded through the drift at the curb, snow over the tops of her boots and into her socks, and ducked into the shelter, and the man on the bench turned his head and looked at her.
He was old. That was the first thing. Seventy-five at least, maybe more, with a long, lined, clean-shaven face gone gray with cold, and a pair of black-framed glasses whose lenses had iced over at the edges. Under the hat his hair was white and cut short. His overcoat was good wool, very old, buttoned to the throat, and he wore a maroon scarf tucked into it the way men had worn scarves in movies when her mother was a girl. His shoes were not boots. They were black leather oxfords, polished, soaked dark to the laces. His lips had a bluish tinge she didn't like.
"Good evening," he said.