When he quit school Eddie started hanging in the streets in the daytime. At fifteen he'd already grown into a big, thick man's body. He wore the same dark T-shirt and dungarees nearly every day. His "workin' " clothes he called them. He walked everywhere he went. He never rode the bus. His mother never owned a car.

At some point he got hold of an abandoned shopping cart, sun flashing off chromed-up wire mesh, plastic handle name of Winn- Dixie. He would fill it with whatever pleased him: scrap metal and aluminum cans for profit, blankets and old coats for warmth, whiskey and wine bottles for company. He would push his cart through the alleys and streets and keep it next to him on the benches when he sat and everyone else got up and moved away.

Eddie would watch them all. People on their way to work. Mothers on their way to the clinic, kids in tow. Girls giggling and whispering secrets to each other. But soon, year after year, they stopped watching him. In time, Eddie became less than a neighborhood blemish. In time, he was a simple fact of life, a shuffling nothing.

Since they could not see him, Eddie had no fear of the night. That's why he now stood in the quiet dark of midnight under the royal poinciana that spread like a shroud over the corner bedroom of Ms. Philomena's house. He'd stood and watched as the lights had gone off one by one, until only the blue glow remained in the old woman's room. Still, Eddie waited. An hour. Two.

He knew Ms. Philomena. He had known her since he was a boy. She would walk her kids to the bus stop, dressed in her own workin' clothes; a long printed dress with a white apron and white shoes for her job on the east side.