Chapter 4: Three Dollars and Forty Cents
Danny's mother's name was Carol.
I found that out because Danny mentioned it himself, the way young children mention things — without realizing how much weight they carry.
"My mom's going to be happy," he said, climbing down from the barber's chair and touching the back of his neck where the hair now ended cleanly.
"She's been saving up too.
We were going to do it together next month."
I looked at Mr.
Lewis.
He looked at me.
"Danny," I said carefully, "does your mom know you came here today?"
He hesitated.
Just half a second.
"I left her a note."
"What did the note say?"
"Gone to the barber.
Back before lunch."
He said it the way children say things they have rehearsed.
Confident in the words.
Less confident in what came after them.
"Does she worry about you?" I asked.
"Sometimes." He zipped up his jacket — too thin for March.
"But I'm careful."
Tyler was watching Danny with an expression I couldn't quite read.
Somewhere between admiration and something older than admiration.
I asked Danny if I could walk him home.
He considered this seriously, the way he seemed to consider everything, and then said yes.
Mr.
Lewis locked up the shop behind us.
He didn't explain why he was coming along.
He just put on his coat and came.
The four of us walked the mile to Sycamore Street.
Danny walked in the middle, between Tyler and me, pointing out things as we went — a dog he knew by name, a corner store where the owner sometimes gave him a piece of candy, a crack in the sidewalk shaped like a lightning bolt that he had named Gerald.
Tyler laughed at Gerald.
Danny looked pleased.
The building on Sycamore Street was a narrow three-story walk-up with a buzzer panel beside the front door.
Several of the name slots were empty.
Danny pressed the button for 2B with the practiced ease of someone who had done it ten thousand times.
Nothing happened.
He pressed it again.
Waited.
Pressed it a third time.
"She might be on the bus still," he said.
He didn't seem alarmed.
He sat down on the front step and pulled his knees up, settling in.
I sat beside him.
"How often do you wait out here?"
"Not that much." A pause.
"Sometimes."
Mr.
Lewis stood at the bottom of the steps with his hands in his coat pockets, looking up at the building.
Tyler sat on Danny's other side and the two of them started talking about baseball — Tyler's team, whether Danny had a team, the correct and incorrect opinions about the best position to play.
We waited twenty minutes.
Then the door at the end of the block swung open and a woman came around the corner moving fast, still in her work uniform — a blue polo shirt with a name tag, dark pants, sneakers that had seen better days.
She was maybe thirty, with Danny's same dark eyes and the look of someone who had been running on not quite enough sleep for long enough that it had stopped feeling unusual.
She saw Danny on the steps and her whole body changed.
The tension went out of her shoulders.
Then she saw the rest of us and the tension came back differently.
"Danny." She was at the steps in four strides.
She crouched down, took his face in both hands, looked him over.
"I got your note.
Mrs.
Farrow from upstairs called me at work, she said she saw you leave alone—" She stopped.
Looked at his hair.
Her eyes went wide.
"Oh, Danny."
"It looks good, right?" he said.
"It looks—" Her voice caught.
She pressed her lips together hard.
"It looks wonderful, baby."
She stood up and looked at me.
There was something in her face that was not quite suspicion and not quite gratitude and was trying to be both at once.
"I'm Carol," she said.
"I'm Diane," I said.
"This is my son Tyler.
And this is Mr.
Lewis — he runs the barbershop on Elm."
Carol looked at Mr.
Lewis.
Something shifted.
"You didn't have to—"
"He walked in and asked politely," Mr.
Lewis said simply.
"That's all I needed."
Carol looked back at Danny.
Her jaw was tight.
"We talked about this.
About going places alone."
"I was careful," Danny said.
"Danny."
"I left a note."
"Danny." Her voice was quiet but it had weight.
"We talked about this."
He looked down at his shoes.
The ones with no laces.
"I know."
She straightened up.
Took a breath.
Looked at me again, and this time the suspicion was gone and what was underneath it was exhaustion and something rawer than that.
"Thank you," she said.
"For walking him back."
"He's a remarkable kid," I said.
And because I didn't know how else to say what I wanted to say, I said it plainly.
"Tyler gave up his spot in the chair so Danny could go first.
He didn't want Danny to have to make the trip twice."
Carol looked at Tyler.
Tyler looked at his shoes, the way he always did when someone was about to say something nice about him.
"Thank you, Tyler," Carol said.
Her voice was careful and sincere and a little bit fragile.
"It's okay," Tyler said.
"Gerald the crack was pretty cool on the way over."
Danny burst out laughing.
Real laughing, the kind that surprised him.
Carol stared at her son for a moment like she was memorizing the sound of it.
Then she looked at me, and her eyes were bright, and she said, "Would you — I mean, I don't have much, but I just got paid, and I was going to make soup tonight.
If you wanted to—"
"We'd love to," I said, before she could talk herself out of it.
Mr.
Lewis cleared his throat.
"I'll leave you all to it."
"You won't stay?" Carol asked.
He looked at the building, at Danny, at the drawing he'd put in his drawer that morning.
"Next time," he said.
"You've got enough people on your steps for one Saturday."
He shook Danny's hand formally, the way you shake a man's hand.
Danny stood up very straight and shook back.
We watched him walk back up the street.
Then Carol unlocked the door and we followed her inside, up two flights of stairs that smelled like old wood and someone's cooking from the floor above, to apartment 2B.
The apartment was small and very clean.
There was a drawing taped to the refrigerator — another crayon drawing, this one of a woman and a small boy standing in front of a building.
Underneath it, in the same large, uneven letters: ME AND MOM.
I stood in the kitchen doorway while Carol filled a pot with water, and I thought about three dollars and forty cents in a zip-lock bag, and a child who planned ahead, and a note left on a kitchen table, and a crack in the sidewalk named Gerald.
And I thought about my son, who had climbed out of a barber's chair without being asked, without being taught, without expecting anything in return.
Tyler was already at the small kitchen table, and Danny was pulling out the chair beside him, and they were arguing cheerfully about Gerald's exact shape and whether it was more of a lightning bolt or more of a river.
Carol caught my eye over the pot.
She didn't say anything.
May you like
Neither did I.
But I stayed for soup.
