The man started to laugh and kept on laughing, not loud, just chuckling to himself with his eyes closed.

“Honey, I just can’t do that,” he said.

Clarence went over into another booth and started flipping through a box of records. He opened up the lid of an old record player, checked out the frayed cord, and picked a wad of dust off the needle. “I don’t sell merchandise that doesn’t work,” he said.

There was a loud humming sound, then the bump-bump-bump as the needle went round and round, coming up on Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison, singing “Long Black Veil.” A little scratch in the record almost kept the beat. The man sat back in the wing chair and smiled. Johnny Cash sang, “She stood in the crowd and she shed not a tear.”

“That’s so sad,” said Charlene, “to think he would love a woman who would do him that way.”

“Come on.” The man shoved himself up out of the chair and took both Charlene’s hands in his. “Dance with me.”

It was so smooth and unexpected that Charlene could not think yes or no. She just all of a sudden found herself slow-dancing cheek to cheek with a total stranger to Johnny Cash singing “Long Black Veil.”

At first he went pretty good, and Charlene could feel the music in the dancing, but toward the end of the song he had slowed down until he was almost standing still, and finally when Johnny Cash got them to the gallows he was just standing there, leaning on Charlene so heavily she felt if she stepped out from under him, he would fall right down. She led him stumbling backward into one of the antique mall’s bedrooms and sat him down on a little four-poster bed.

“I just want to rest my eyes for a minute, just a little minute,” he said, and next thing they knew he was sound asleep, breathing with a little rasping sound at the back of his throat.

There is something vulnerable about a sleeping person that brings out tender feelings of protection and care, not quite maternal. Charlene and Clarence looked at the man for a while, then went on about their business, each feeling the weight of that trust in his own way.

Charlene went home and thawed out a casserole and cooked a pot of rice and got her best tomato off the windowsill. Clarence put up the CLOSED sign on the door and turned off the outside lights and went back to work oiling a leather ottoman.

The man slept on and on. It got dark—the quiet early dark that comes to small towns on the eastern edge of a time zone. At six Charlene came back with her chicken divan and a pan of biscuits and a steamed pudding. Soon the smell of food took over the smell of furniture wax and neat’s-foot oil.