(1) The black plastic nametag hand-pressed with rough white lettering announced “Apt 2-B, Naomi S. Delman,” as behind me (2) a deep male voice asked, “Delman?” and (3) when I turned to find a young black grocery-delivery boy holding two bags, one sprouting celery stalks, as I honestly barked, “Yes” (already hoping to sneak groceries upstairs toward my aunt), beyond this kid waiting on the steps, I saw—advancing toward me—(4) Clyde. As (5) a handsome old woman moving right along.

She leaned on an oak cane. She squinted up here at me. I fished a fiver from my pocket. I palmed it toward the kid, who thanked me as he all but hurled two bags my way. Leaving, he posed—prepared to hold open the metal gate. Then, seeing how slow the old lady really was, he let it slam, lurched back off to the right.

Her pace gave me time to stare with greedy happiness while planning not to plan too much. Seeing her walking stick, gauging the weight of these bags’ canned goods, I just hoped to get upstairs.

2-B. Or not 2-B. At least at last I’d seen her.

She advanced with the labored stalwart posture of some aged Baptist-church deaconess.—From thirty feet, I saw the habit of rectitude, the personal tidiness of a retired chief librarian. She might’ve been part Cherokee, her hair still dark, yanked back with card-catalogue factuality then filed simply behind her skull, “a place for everything….”

Though Naomi dragged toward this gated yard, though you sensed she’d overspent her energy and gasped a bit, she still showed the hatchet certainty of somebody once considered fairly handsome. I recalled a paley pretty girl shown wearing her white graduation cap beside Sutie’s bed. But the old woman I now confronted looked too much like her departed brother to have ever been quite “attractive.” Time had turned her far more toward Clyde, his odd lank certainty, the angular dubious knottedness. I could’ve picked her out of a vast crowd as his kin, mine.

Is anything more intriguing than family resemblance? Especially, of course, one’s own? Her mouth was overlarge. She’d started calling my way à la Dewey decimal system. “Delman? Groceries for? Coming.” I thought, on seeing her up closer, “She looks like Eleanor Roosevelt.” So had Clyde! Too broad a mouth, yet kinder for that. Eyes sad, though easily distracted. She resembled Eleanor right down to a club-lady-like jacketed green suit, its skirt overlong.

As Naomi took hold of the stoop’s banister, I—slouched up here trying to act “casual”—decided I was overdressed for a delivery boy. So I lifted the celeried bag, hid my striped tie. She called, “They promised me you’d be here later, but no matter today. Slow as I’ve gotten, though, in future be sure and turn up when they tell me. Understood?” “Yes, ma’am,” I sounded (and now felt) so Southern.