He knotted the left lace twice, the extra loop something he'd started doing after the sole caught on a storm drain and nearly put him face-down on Clement Street. The right shoe went faster. He stood and the floor was cold through his sock where the heel had compressed down to almost nothing, and he thought for the fourth or fifth time that he should buy new shoes, and didn't write it down.
He stood there long enough that his breath made a small cloud and dissolved. The flag was stuck halfway up from whenever he'd last bothered, a Thursday probably - and he pressed it down with his thumb until the hinge caught. Across the street the Nguyens' recycling bin had blown onto the sidewalk again, the blue lid open like a mouth. He let go of the mailbox.
He had learned to step left of the buckled square near the Balboa crosswalk, weight on the outside edge, a small shuffle that left a dark scuff on the concrete over time. The ginkgo on Ninth dropped everything in a single Tuesday in November, as if it had made a decision overnight - and he walked through the yellow carpet of it before the street sweeper could. Dottie's window was the one with the African violet on the sill, and she lifted her mug each morning without raising her eyes from whatever she was reading, and he lifted a hand back, and neither of them had ever once acknowledged the arrangement out loud.
The phone went off somewhere near the hydrant on Funston, her name filling the scratched screen - the same photo from three Thanksgivings ago where she was laughing at something off-frame. He stood with his thumb over the side button and didn't press it. A pigeon landed on the hydrant cap, considered him, left. He put the phone back in the left pocket, the one without the hole, and walked.
He sat on the second step - not the first, because the first one still had the crack he'd meant to fill with that tube of gray compound he'd bought and lost somewhere in the back of the utility closet. The mud from the Nguyens' lawn had worked into the gap where the sole was lifting, and he pressed it flat against the step and it rose again. A crow was doing something in the recycling bin across the street. He didn't go in.
He pressed the right toe against the baseboard to work it off without bending, the way he always did, and the heel lining peeled up a little more - the pale foam showing through where the fabric had worn to nothing. He set them side by side on the mat, left toe angled out the way it always fell, and didn't straighten it. The porch light caught the scuff on the left cap, the one from the storm drain, still there - a gray parenthesis opening toward the door. He turned the deadbolt and the shoes were behind him in the dark.
He hung his jacket on the third hook, not the second, because the second one had held her coat for eleven years and still did, even empty. The kettle had already clicked off - he'd set it before leaving, a guess at the time - and the water was just past hot - not quite right, the way it always was. He poured it anyway, the steam barely rising, and stood at the counter while the bag turned the water the color of a bad bruise. The mug had a chip on the rim that he'd stopped noticing until he noticed it again, and he turned it so the chip faced the wall - and drank.
He carried the mug to the window and the notepad on the sill had the week's crossword, Monday's, three letters filled in and then abandoned, the pencil laid across it at the angle it always ended up at. The light came through low and turned the tea almost amber, and he held the mug up once - just to see it, then set it down. He picked up the pencil and wrote nothing. He looked at 7-Across for a while, *Cartographer's product*, four letters, and the pigeons were back on the hydrant across the street - two of them now, and he watched them instead.
He set the mug on the notepad, not meaning to, and when he lifted it the paper had taken a ring, a brown circle that bled into Monday's grid - softening the black squares at the edges until 7-Across was half-gone. He found the pencil and traced the ring once, slowly, following it around. Outside, the street sweeper turned onto Funston, its brushes loud and then quieter - and he listened to it go. He didn't fill in the answer.
He found the tea bag on the edge of the sink where he'd set it to drip and forgotten it, the string coiled in a small wet figure-eight on the porcelain. He dropped it in the compost and washed his hands and stood there with the water running longer than he needed to, the cold working up from the pipes until it turned warm. The notepad was still on the sill when he came back, the brown ring darker now, the pencil inside the circle like something plotted on a map. He left it there.
He found the spare key in the junk drawer while he was looking for a stamp - the key on the ring with the small brass lighthouse, and he held it for a moment before putting it back under the rubber bands. The stamp was a flag, slightly crooked on the envelope, and he pressed it flat with his thumb and it lifted at one corner anyway. He set the envelope on the counter and didn't take it to the mailbox. The flag outside was still halfway up.
He found the African violet on the sill three days later, one stem broken and hanging by a thread of green - and he went to the utility closet for the gray compound and came back with a twist tie instead. He wrapped it around the stem twice, tight, then looser, the violet nodding at the window in a way that looked almost intentional. From across the street Dottie's light was already off, her mug gone from the sill - and he stood there holding the remaining length of twist tie without knowing what to do with it. He set it on the notepad, inside the brown ring, next to the pencil.
He found a second twist tie in his jacket pocket the next morning, coiled around nothing, and put it in his left hand while he knotted the laces with his right. The ginkgo had dropped a second round - smaller, the yellow gone brown at the edges and flattened to the sidewalk by rain, and he stepped through it anyway. Dottie's mug was back on the sill, but the African violet was gone, replaced by something low and succulent he didn't know the name of - and she lifted the mug the same way, eyes down. He transferred the twist tie to the pocket without the hole and walked the rest of the block holding nothing.
