Ezra told me about the neighborhood when cornfields still stood where the elementary school is now. I told him about my own life and how I had moved in thinking I would only stay for two years.
“Funny how that works,” he said. “I told my wife the same thing about this place in 1971!”
My neighbor mentioned a nephew once, somewhere in the middle of the conversation. Marcus, I think. He said the name the way someone says the name of a relative they used to know well, with a small pause afterward.
“He calls sometimes,” Ezra said. “When he needs something.”
The old man gave a little shrug like it did not matter, but his eyes rested on his cup for a second too long. I did not press him. It was not my business, and he did not seem eager to make it mine.
When I got up to leave, I tapped the doorframe.
“Hey, next time you get groceries, just call me. Save your back,” I joked.
“I wouldn’t want to bother you.”
“Then don’t think of it as a bother.”
My neighbor smiled at that, slowly and a little crookedly.
I walked back across the narrow strip of grass between our homes with my hands in my pockets, thinking I had done one small, decent thing on a quiet Sunday, nothing beyond that. I had no idea that one cup of coffee had started a clock that would keep running for the next 12 years.
—
Twelve years. That was how long one helpful Sunday slowly became a quiet ritual neither of us ever needed to name.
Ezra’s health began to fade in little ways at first. A slower walk to the mailbox. A hand that shook slightly when he poured coffee. Then driving became too difficult, and I started picking up his groceries every Sunday without either of us ever making an official arrangement.
During the first few weeks, Ezra tried to press money into my hand at the door.
“Anthony, take it. I’m not a charity case.”
“Ezra, I’m already going to the store. It’s the same trip.”
“Then take it for the gas.”
“Next week,” I’d say, knowing I had no intention of taking it then either.
Eventually, he stopped trying, and we settled into something better. I would put the milk in the refrigerator, set the bread on the counter, and then we would sit at his small kitchen table with two mugs between us.
Some Sundays, we talked about his late wife, Margaret, and the garden she used to care for. Other Sundays, Ezra asked about my job, my marriage, and whether my wife, Claire, and I had made up our minds about children. And on some Sundays, we barely spoke at all and simply watched the birds gather at his feeder.
I did not think of it as anything remarkable. It was just what my Sundays had become.
—
Claire and I married when I was 38, and she noticed right away that my Sundays with Ezra meant more than I admitted.
“You’re going over there again?” she asked one morning, half teasing and half serious.
“It’s an hour. Maybe two.”
“You’re really going to keep doing this every week? For years?” my wife asked.
“Ezra doesn’t have anyone else,” I protested.
Claire softened then, the way she always did, and handed me a tin of cookies she had baked the night before.
“Take these to him. And tell him I said hello.”
I did.
—
Ezra held the tin as though it were something valuable and asked me three separate times to thank her.
