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I really did. I’d walk into my office feeling warm, feeling like I’d done my small kind thing for the day. I bought him socks in the winter. I once spent half my lunch break calling shelters when the temperature dropped below zero, going down a list, getting hung up on, getting put on hold, until I found him a bed for two nights.
I brought him the address written on a napkin.
“You’ll go?” I asked. “Promise me you’ll go.”
“I’ll go.”
“Larry.”
“I’ll go, Sarah. Cross my heart.”
He thanked me for that napkin like I’d handed him the deed to a house.
I felt wonderful.
It never once occurred to me, in two whole years, that Larry might be learning something too. That every time I solved a problem for him, I was teaching him exactly how I worked. What I responded to. How to reach me.
I thought I was studying him.
He was studying me.
The freezing Tuesday came at the end of January.
I remember it was cold enough that the coffee steam looked like smoke, and my breath hung in the air in front of me. I bought the two coffees and walked over to Larry’s spot, and I stopped.
Because Larry looked terrible.
His skin had gone a strange yellowish color, like an old photograph. His lips were pale. His hands, when I gave him his cup, trembled so badly the lid rattled.
And across his knees he held a piece of cardboard. On it, in thick black marker, he’d written:
MARRY ME. I HAVE ONE MONTH LEFT TO LIVE.
I stood there. The traffic noise seemed to fade out, the way it does in movies, except this was real and it was happening to me.
“What is this?” I said, pointing at the sign.
He looked at the cardboard like he’d forgotten it was there.
“The clinic gave me about a month.”
I don’t remember deciding to sit. I just found myself on the cold concrete beside him, my nice work coat pressed against the dirty wall.
“What?” I said. “A month for what?”