“And … I’m not sure I know anymore when I don’t know.” He sighs, turns to look out the window for a long moment. Then, turning back to me, “Who can be with me, Myra? Not Diann. Not Diann, she can’t do it. This is so lonely, I’m in here so alone. That’s the thing that hurts the most. Somebody draws this small circle, you step inside. Somebody stops the bus and tells you you have to get off and you’re not nearly where you wanted to go, but you have to get off. And nobody will look at you the whole way down the aisle. If only they would look.”

I take his hand and do that hardest of things; sit still and say nothing. He lets me hold this small part of himself while he quietly weeps, and we sit there watching people come out of the store with bags full of things for their ordinary lives. And I would bet everything I own that Chip and I are feeling the same thing: a longing as wide as the world. On my wrist, a watch ticks. Second by second goes by. This is how the days pass. In this small, measured way. You can see it. The second hand moves relentlessly around the clock face. Forward. Forward. Forward. More than once in my life I have wanted to just stop everything.

* * *

DeWitt has cleaned his apartment; there’s the scent of Pine Sol everywhere. He offers his big chair to Chip, then sits beside me on the sofa. “So. Where you from?”

“New York City,” Chip says. “But I was raised around here.”

“You like living there?” He scratches his chest lazily. He is in his stocking feet, and one little toe shows through one of the holes.

“I’m not sure anyone does, really.”

“So how come you stay?”

A long moment passes, and then Chip laughs. “You know what? I don’t have a good answer for that.” He’s so nervous; his hands are clenched, his back ramrod straight.

“Well, his work,” I tell DeWitt. “It was a good place to be for what he does.”

“What line of work you in?” DeWitt asks.

“I’m a stockbroker.”

DeWitt leans back, stretches his arm along the top of the sofa. “Yeah, I’m a bidnessman myself. I know sometime you got to do what you don’t want to do. That’s so, later on, you can do what you want to do.”

“I guess that’s the way it works.” Chip looks around the living room. “How about you? Have you lived here long?”

“Twenty-seven years,” DeWitt says. And then, abruptly, “What do you say we take a tour through my candy store? You tense, man. You got to relax. That’s the first thing. I got something for everything, and I got something for you.”

“DeWitt,” I say.

“Just a little something, on the house.”

“DeWitt!”