“Bless you,” he said, and his eyes filled again and overflowed, and the tears meandered through the crosshatches of the skin around his eyes.
They’d just met. She'd been standing, the sun in her eyes, balancing a grocery bag of bananas and almond flour and walnuts on her hip and searching through her purse for her keys - the whole operation taking up more time and energy than she had to spare. The latest argument with Rory had been playing out in an endless loop in her mind, his words muted and defeated, hers shrill and angry. Now, self-righteousness mingled with regret; an acid combination that landed hard in her heart. Again.
She didn't notice the man passing by, until, exasperated, she gave up poking in her purse for the keys, and they fell, suddenly, with a metallic thud to the pavement. The man - where had he come from? - reached down to get them slowly. He was an old man, slim and tall, wearing a neat button down work shirt and blue workpants, just like the ones her dad used to order from the Sears catalog in the 1950s. kind with two slit pockets in the back, one of which undoubtedly held a freshly-laundered square of handkerchief.
“Think you lost these.” he said, as he handed her the keys with a quiet gravity.
She took the keys, resettled the groceries on her hip, stared hard, and then remembered to thank him. He nodded and started to walk away. Instead, he stopped and faced her again and spoke.
“You know what my dad always said?”
She inhaled sharply. “What did he say?”
“If you lose something and you can't find it, it was never yours to begin with.”
She paused and squinted. “Really? That doesn't sound quite right.”
He smiled now and his eyes lit up too.
”Yup, my dad wasn't quite right. Wish I'd picked up on that as quick as you did.”
He tipped his head in a gentle farewell and she surprised both of them by laying her free hand on his forearm. “You know what I think?” she said, looking at him earnestly, “I think we're forever losing and finding, finding and losing. It never stops.” She spoke louder now. “Maybe some things, maybe nothing, ever belongs to us. Maybe it's all on loan.” She lowered her voice now and released his arm, “Maybe nothing is ever really ours.”
Suddenly embarrassed to be unraveling in front of the market in front of a stranger, she lowered her head and stared down at their feet, his in steel-toed work boots, her pedicured toes poking out from crisscross sandal straps.
When she looked up again, the man's eyes had filled with tears. But she didn’t look away. She forgot about the fight with Rory, she forgot about what she had lost and what she knew would be lost still.
She shifted the bag of groceries to the other hip, looked up at the old man and asked, “Everything is always working to heal the oldest wounds, isn't it?”
“Bless you.” he said