“Yes, ma’am. I think I am. ”
Anna led them to a table by the front window. She brought a basket of warm bread, soup, roasted chicken with potatoes and green beans, a glass of milk for Elijah, and coffee for Harold.
She refilled the bread basket twice without being asked. Halfway through the chicken, Elijah set his fork down. “Sir,” he said, “may I ask you something? ”
“You may ask me anything.
”
“Why are you doing this? ”
Harold took a slow sip of coffee. He set the cup down carefully. “When I was about your age, I lived in a town in western Pennsylvania that does not exist anymore.
My father had been gone a long time. My mother was a seamstress. We did not have much. There were days I went to school hungry, and days I came home hungrier still, because my mother had given me the only piece of bread in the house for my lunch and had eaten nothing herself.
”
He paused. “One afternoon I saw an old woman drop a sack of apples on the sidewalk. She was bent over trying to pick them up and could not quite manage it. I was hungry enough that the smell of those apples almost made me dizzy.
I could have picked one up and put it in my pocket. She would not have known. No one would have blamed me. ”
He looked at Elijah steadily.
“I did not do that. I picked up every apple, put them back in her arms, and walked her to her door. When we got there, she invited me in and gave me a bowl of stew I can still taste if I close my eyes. Her name was Mrs.
Kowalski. She fed me supper twice a week for the next four years. She is the reason I am sitting here tonight. ”
Elijah was very still.
“You did for me today what I did for her a long time ago,” Harold said quietly. “So I am doing for you what she did for me. ”
When the meal was over, Anna walked them to the door. She bent down to Elijah’s height.
“You come back anytime, Elijah. You tell whoever is at the door that Anna is expecting you, and there will always be a plate. ”
Outside, the air had grown colder. Harold paused on the sidewalk.
“I am going to ask you one more thing tonight. The house I live in has more rooms than any one old man needs. There is a guest room with a bed that has clean sheets and a door that locks from the inside. I would like to offer you that room for tonight, for as many nights as you need while we figure out together what comes next.
You may say no. Marcus will take you anywhere you ask. But I am making the offer plainly. ”
Elijah thought about the clean sheets he had not slept in for three weeks, the door that locked from the inside, the long hungry nights, the small careful animal of hope he had been trying not to crush all afternoon.
“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir. I would like that. ”
The house was a long low farmhouse made of pale stone with warm yellow light coming from the windows.
Dorothy, the woman who looked after the property, was waiting in the front hall. She did not make a fuss. She simply said, “Welcome, young man. The guest room is made up.
Are you tired? ”
Elijah nodded. That was the beginning. Harold’s lawyers helped Elijah’s grandmother get the care she needed.
Elijah went back to school, a different school. He kept the small white business card in the inside pocket of a new jacket that fit him properly, and he kept the photograph of his mother in the same pocket, and he kept the peppermint candy too, because he had decided the moment he had been saving it for was the moment he no longer needed to save it. Years passed. Harold saw Elijah graduate from high school.
He saw him accepted into a university on a scholarship Harold had arranged without ever letting Elijah know. He did not see him graduate from college because he died quietly in his sleep the winter before, with Dorothy holding his hand and Elijah sitting in the chair beside the bed reading aloud. In Harold’s will, there was a letter for Elijah. It said, “I want you to remember three things.
The first is that your mother chose your name. The second is that you carried my groceries when no one else would. The third is that the world gets better only when people decide to be the better part of it, and you, Elijah Monroe, were the better part of mine. ”
Elijah is 43 now.
He runs a foundation in Cleveland that finds children who are sleeping where they should not be sleeping and offers them a door that locks from the inside and a bed with clean sheets. He named the foundation after a woman in Pennsylvania he never met. He calls it Kowalski House.