Eli killed the engine ten yards past the old man and walked the Sportster back on foot, because it felt wrong to ride up on him loud.
"Hey," Eli said softly. "Mister? You okay?"
The old man was crouching — slowly, joints protesting audibly — picking up apples one at a time and setting them in the crook of his arm. His glasses were mud-streaked, and he kept having to stop and wipe them on a sleeve that was just as wet, which didn't help. Up close, Eli could see the water beading in the thin gray hair plastered to his scalp, the tremor in his hands that might have been cold or age or shock, and the way his brown coat hung heavy and dark, soaked clean through to the lining.
"I'm all right, son," the old man said, without looking up. His voice was thin but steady, with no shake in it at all — and that steadiness, Eli thought later, was the strangest thing about the whole afternoon. "Just clumsy with the bag."
"It wasn't the bag," Eli said. "It was us. I'm sorry. That was — that shouldn't have happened."
The old man finally looked at him. His eyes, behind the smeared lenses, were a pale washed blue, and they studied Eli's face for a long moment with an expression Eli couldn't read at all. Not anger. Not fear. Not even surprise, really. Something older than all of those — the look of a man who had seen this particular movie before and already knew how it ended.
"You're with them," the old man said. It wasn't a question.
"Yes, sir." Eli felt the shame of it crawl up the back of his neck like a hot hand. "I'm a prospect. Eleven months."
"Prospect." The old man nodded slowly, as if the word meant something to him — as if it were a word from a language he used to speak. Then he bent back to the apples.
Eli crouched down beside him and started gathering. The eggs were a total loss — yolk and shell ground into the gravel in a yellow mess no one could salvage. The bread was mud-caked beyond saving. But they saved seven apples, bruised but sound, a dented can of tomato soup, and a paper sack of flour that had somehow stayed dry in the middle. Eli worked carefully, handing each apple over like it mattered, because the old man handled them like they mattered.
"You'll catch your death out here wet," Eli said, and stripped off his own flannel overshirt — dry, still warm from the engine heat — and draped it around the old man's shoulders before the man could refuse it.
"I've caught worse," the old man said, but he pulled the flannel close with both hands, and Eli saw his fingers were shaking now, just a little.
"Where do you live? I'll ride you home. Or — wait here, I'll go to Miller's and replace all of it. The eggs, the bread, all of it. It was our doing."
The old man studied him for a long moment. "You don't have to do that, son. It was one man's doing, not seven."
"It was seven men laughing," Eli said quietly. "That counts."
Something shifted in the old man's face then — a flicker, gone before Eli could name it. "Earl," he said, as if he'd decided something. "Earl Whitaker."
"Eli Foster." Eli stood up and swung a leg over the Sportster. "Mr. Whitaker — stay off the road a bit, up on the grass. I'll be back in twenty minutes."
He rode to Miller's Grocery with the ruined list memorized — a dozen eggs, six apples, a loaf of bread, tomato soup, flour — and spent forty-two dollars and change he had been saving for a new front tire, because some debts don't wait for convenient timing. Old Man Miller himself bagged it, double plastic, and asked no questions about the flannel missing from Eli's back.
Back on the shoulder, Eli pressed the bags into Earl Whitaker's hands along with the coins of change. "Can I ride you home? It's no trouble, honest."
Earl smiled then, a small creased thing that transformed his whole face. "I like the walk, son. It's Thursday. I always walk on Thursday." He started down the shoulder, then stopped and looked back. "You gave me your shirt. You'll freeze on that bike."
"I've got the engine," Eli said, which wasn't really an answer, but Earl seemed to accept it.
Eli watched until the small brown figure rounded the bend past the Miller's Crossing sign, then fired up the Sportster and rode to the Fast Stop — where six men were waiting with hot coffee, and where the story of the puddle was already getting better every time Wade told it.
He heard it before he was off the bike — Wade's voice carrying across the lot, doing the splash sound effect with his mouth, Tommy's braying laugh answering it.
"—and I'm telling you, the eggs went everywhere, it was like a cartoon — oh, here he comes, the Good Samaritan himself!"
Eli parked at the far end, out of the light, and walked over with his helmet under his arm. The six were sprawled around two picnic tables, coffee cups steaming, and Wade had his boots up on the bench, holding court like a king.
"Tell us, Prospect," Wade said, grinning. "Did you kiss it better?"
"I replaced his groceries," Eli said evenly. "Forty-two dollars."
"Forty-two dollars!" Tommy howled. "Wade, you owe this kid forty-two dollars!"
"I owe him a lesson," Wade said, and his grin didn't waver, but something in his eyes went flat. "The lesson is: the world is full of old men standing in the wrong place, Prospect. You can't save them all. You try, you'll go broke and soft, and soft men don't wear this diamond." He tapped his chest.
Eli got a coffee — black, the prospect's drink — and sat at the end of the far table, in the dark beyond the sodium light. He didn't argue. Arguing with Wade was like arguing with weather. But as the story got told a third time — the old man was eighty-five now, the puddle was a lake — Eli found himself studying the faces around the tables, one by one, memorizing them. Hoss, laughing with his whole belly. Big Mike, chuckling into his cup. Jace, half a beat behind. Deke, smiling thinly.
He wanted to remember exactly how they looked, laughing. Because something told him — quiet as a whisper, certain as stone — that this was the last time any of them would ever laugh about that puddle.
He just didn't know yet how right he was.