Part 3: Our Sunday Agreement
At first, I expected the arrangement to last a few weeks.
Ezra would give me a grocery list on Sunday morning. I would shop for my own family, pick up his items, and bring them over in the afternoon.
Every week, he tried to pay me.
And every week, I refused.
“Anthony, groceries cost money,” he said after our third Sunday.
“I’ve heard rumors.”
“Then take this.”
He pushed several bills across the table.
I pushed them back.
“Consider the groceries payment for the coffee.”
“One cup of coffee is not worth sixty-three dollars.”
“You make exceptional coffee.”
The next Sunday, he slipped money into my jacket pocket.
I found it before leaving and placed it beneath his sugar bowl.
The week after that, he hid cash under the passenger-side floor mat of my truck.
I discovered it two days later and returned it in an envelope labeled:
NICE TRY.
For months, we continued our ridiculous battle.
Eventually, Ezra stopped trying to hand me money.
Instead, he fed me.
He kept oatmeal cookies in a metal tin on the counter. In winter, he made soup. In summer, he served lemonade in glasses that had belonged to his wife.
Her name was Helen.
They had met at a county fair when they were seventeen.
“She beat me at a ring-toss game,” Ezra told me. “Then she refused to give me the stuffed bear she won.”
“So you married her to get it back?”
“That was the plan.”
“Did it work?”
“No. She kept it for fifty-eight years.”
Helen had passed away shortly before Rachel and I moved into the neighborhood.
Ezra still kept her coffee mug in the cabinet beside his own.
He never used it, but he never moved it either.
Most Sundays, I stayed for thirty minutes.
Some Sundays, I stayed for two hours.
We talked about the neighborhood, sports, old cars, motorcycles, business, family, and the increasing price of coffee. Sometimes Ezra told stories about his younger years. Other times, I complained about my shop or worried aloud about raising a daughter.
And sometimes we simply sat at the table while jazz played on the radio.
Those were the Sundays I came to value most.
There was no pressure to be entertaining. No expectation that either of us needed to solve anything.
We were simply two people sitting in the same room, making the room feel less empty.
