He meant it. Not because $2 was enough money. It was not. He knew that.
He meant it because she had not looked at him with pity. She had looked at him like a person who had done something useful.
He had not felt that in a long time. She drove away. She did not know his name.
She did not know where he was going. She did not know that the $2 in his pocket were about to become the most important small amount of money in both their lives.
Eugene watched her tail lights disappear into the rain. He put the $2 in his coat pocket.
He started walking toward the Grand Meridian Hotel. The jeweler store across the street had a deep entrance elovt of overhead cover, a dry strip of concrete.
Eugene sat down against the door. He pulled his coat tighter and looked at the hotel across the street, the warm light in the windows, a couple checking out under the awning, the ordinary machinery of a world that had quietly decided he was not part of it.
He was not angry about it. Anger cost energy he did not have. He had stopped sustaining anger a long time ago.
He put his hand in his coat pocket. He felt the $2. He thought about the woman in the rain.
The way she had said genuinely like she meant the whole word. Samantha used to say it that way only when she meant it completely.
She said at the night he proposed in the parking lot of a Coney Island restaurant in Dearbornne because he had planned something better and it had fallen through and he had panicked and done it there in the February cold ring in his pocket.
No speech prepared. She had said I am genuinely going to say yes to you right now.
Eugene Hol genuinely 31 years of marriage then 11 months beside her hospital bed then a house that still smelled like her and no idea what to do with himself.
He had tried eight months back at work. Sunday calls to Renee. The right motions in the right order.
But grief had a way of finding the seams in a person. The places where something was always held together by something else.
Samantha had been the something else. The gambling started in Windsor across the river just once just to feel something other than a Sunday evening alone.
Then twice. Then he stopped counting. By the time he understood what was happening, the house was gone.
The savings, the career. Renee had stopped calling 3 years ago. She had tried everything first.
Showed up at his door, sent letters, called his former colleagues. Her messages got longer and more desperate, and then shorter and more final, and then nothing.
She had a daughter now, Ammani, 5 years old. He had met her once, barely when she was two, in the last weeks before Renee went silent.
He did not know what her laugh sounded like. He did not know if she had Samantha’s hands.
Samantha never got to meet her. That was the detail that came to him sometimes in the dark.
Somewhere in this city, a 5-year-old girl was growing up without knowing her grandfather existed.
