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By Root 1782 0

our free cola certificates, and then I hustled my wife and kids back into the car. I’d had enough. We drove out of the Westland parking lot, then were directed by a detour sign into a service drive that circled the entire shopping center and reentered the lot on the north side, back at the clown races. I saw Jaynee again, still in the rain, hugging her American dad, and Jody holding on to his elbow, looking up at him, pressing her thigh against his. I took another exit out of the lot but somehow made the same mistake I had made before and, once again, found myself back in Westland. Every service drive seemed designed to bring us back to this same scene of father, daughter, and second wife. I gave them credit for who they were and what they were doing—I give them credit now—but I had to get out of there immediately. I don’t know how I managed to get out of that place, but on the fourth try I succeeded.

Shelter

COOPER HAD STOPPED at a red light on his way to work and was adjusting the dial on his radio when he looked up and saw a man in a filthy brown corduroy suit and a three-day growth of beard staring in through the front windshield and picking with his fingernails at Cooper’s windshield wiper. Whenever Cooper had seen this man before, on various Ann Arbor street corners, he had felt a wave of uneasiness and unpleasant compassion. Rolling down the window and leaning out, Cooper said, “Wait a minute there. Just wait a minute. If you get out of this intersection and over to that sidewalk, I’ll be with you in a minute”—the man stared at him—“I’ll have something for you.”

Cooper parked his car at a meter two blocks up, and when he returned, the man in the corduroy suit was standing under a silver maple tree, rubbing his back against the bark.

“Didn’t think you’d come back,” the man said, glancing at Cooper. His hair fell over the top of his head in every direction.

“How do you do?” Cooper held his hand out, but the man—who seemed rather old, close up—didn’t take it. “I’m Cooper.” The man smelled of everything, a bit like a municipal dump. Cooper tried not to notice it.

“It doesn’t matter who I am,” the man said, standing unsteadily. “I don’t care who I am. It’s not worth anybody thinking about it.” He looked up at the sky and began to pick at his coat sleeve.

“What’s your name?” Cooper asked softly. “Tell me your name, please.”

The old man’s expression changed. He stared at the blue sky, perfectly empty of clouds, and after a moment said, “My mother used to call me James.”

“Good. Well, then, how do you do, James?” The man looked dubiously at his own hand, then reached over and shook. “Would you like something to eat?”

“I like sandwiches,” the man said.

“Well, then,” Cooper said, “that’s what we’ll get you.”

As they went down the sidewalk, the man stumbled into the side of a bench at a bus stop and almost tripped over a fire hydrant. He had a splay-footed walk, as if one of his legs had once been broken. Cooper began to pilot him by touching him on his back.

“Would you like to hear a bit of the Gospels?” the man asked.

“All right. Sure.”

He stopped and held on to a light pole. “This is the fourth book of the Gospels. Jesus is speaking. He says, ‘I will not leave you desolate; I will come to you. Yet a little while, and the world will see me no more, but you will see me; because I live, you will live also.’ That’s from John,” the man said. They were outside the Ann Arbor Diner, a neon-and-chrome Art Deco hamburger joint three blocks down from the university campus. “There’s more,” the old man said, “but I don’t remember it.”

“Wait here,” Cooper said. “I’m going to get you a sandwich.”

The man was looking uncertainly at his lapel, fingering a funguslike spot.

“James!” Cooper said loudly. “Promise me you won’t go away!”

The man nodded.

When Cooper came out again with a bag of french fries, a carton of milk, and a hamburger, the man had moved down the street and was leaning against the plate-glass window of a seafood restaurant with his hands covering his face. “James!” Cooper said. “Here’s your meal.