The bus stop was barren minus this old white guy with a patchy beard and an orange beanie. He had a big bag of pretzels between his feet, and a jar of peanut butter nestled into the crook of his elbow. He was scooping hulking chunks of peanut butter onto the pretzels and inhaling them in one bite. They weren’t small pretzels. Which is to say he was taking some big bites.

            “Mind if I sit?” I gestured to the opposite end of the bench. He nodded. I left enough room for a moderately obese man-spreader. As I sat I felt something squishy press against my butt cheek. I thought I might’ve shat myself, but it was just the bag of mushrooms in my back pocket. I stood back up and moved them to my front pocket. They were legal or decriminalized or something by that time, and I’d just bought an eighth. I can’t remember if I’d done any by the time I got to the bus stop. Let’s say I did.

            The old man held the jar of peanut butter within a few inches of my mouth. “Care for a pretzel?” he said.

            “I’m okay,” I said.

            “Okay-siree-bob,” said the old man.

            I checked the bus schedule app, which had just said the 30-bus was 5 minutes away, and now it said the 30-bus was 5,000 minutes away. I closed out the app and re-opened it. Now it was 500 minutes away.

            “You ever seen something like that?” The old man was pointing across the street at the metro station.

            “A metro station?” I said.

            “Not quite,” the old man laughed. “Not quite what I was getting at.” He stuck the jar of peanut butter into the pretzel bag. He rolled the bag up and secured it with a large safety pin he procured from the fold of his beanie. “Always comes in handy,” he said. “Thing has saved my life once or twice.”

            “A safety pin?”

            The old man laughed. “Well I sure wasn’t talkin bout my wife.” He took the fingerless glove off of one hand and stuck it in his pocket. On the other hand he was wearing a mitten. “You married, kid?” he asked.

            “I am not.”

            “Good for you,” the old man shook his head. “Smart man.” He set the pretzel bag down on the ground and left the shelter of the bus stop’s plastic encasement. I thought he might be leaving, but he circled around behind my back and re-appeared in front of me. “I’ve been married twice, kid. That’s two times, for those keeping tally at home. One was to this big chick from down south. Or maybe it was east. Definitely wasn’t west – that’s where I was from, and I never saw her around. Tied the knot when I was, oh, 16 maybe, definitely no older than 20. She was 40 or 50 or 35. Had five kids she only saw on Halloween and Christmas. We stuck it out for close to six months, ‘for her hubby came banging on the door – a door I built myself. Well not the whole door, I installed the doorknob. I was the doorknob king for a while. I’ve forgotten more about doorknobs than you’ll ever know. And this was a hell of a doorknob, but the big bastard tried to knock the damn door down, forget about the doorknob! I didn’t need any of that. I told her just that: ‘I don’t need any of this.’ We got a divorce the next day. An annulment the next week. I didn’t care much about annulments, but it was real important to her ‘cause of Jesus and all that. Her dad was a minister. Mom was a pope or something or other. Big time Catholics, or possibly Episcopalians. Didn’t stick around long enough to find out. Plus we were never officially married in the first place, which sure made the divorce confusing, and don’t even get me started on the annulment.”

            I felt a tingly sensation in my leg. I patted around my groin to make sure I hadn’t pissed myself. I hadn’t.

            The old man let out a long, hard sigh and turned his back to me. He stood on the curb with his fists pressed against his hips. His sleeves were rolled up to his elbows, and tattoos in the shape of lightning shot down the ends of his arms, dancing around thick, protruding veins the color of bruises.

            “What about the other wife?” I said to the beauty mark on the back of his neck.

            “What was that?” he threw the words over his shoulder, violently cranking his neck in the process. He sat back down next to me, his gloveless hand rubbing the base of his neck.

            “You said you had two wives,” I said. “What about the other one?”

            The old man took the peanut butter jar out of the pretzel bag. He stuck his hand in wrist deep and slurped peanut butter off two fingers like it was linguini. “The other one wasn’t the other one,” he said, “she was the one.” He looked over at me and pointed his peanut butter fingers in my direction. “You don’t know about that stuff yet. What are you? 17? 14?”

            “24,” I said.

            “24,” the old man shook his head. “That’s how old she was when I was 26.”

            “She was two years younger?”

            “She was three years older,” he said, putting the peanut butter back in the pretzel bag. “She was also three inches taller. I was around 73 inches at the time, about what I am now, and she was 76. Damn near 80 inches when she wore those heels. I fell in love with those heels, kid, I really did.” The old man took a box of cigarettes out of his pocket. Inside the box was a thick Cuban cigar and an old zippo lighter. He torched the Cigar and took a puff big enough to blow the whole house down. “We met in college,” he said. “Or she was in college, I was around the way. Right around the time I graduated from doorknobs. Moved on up to doorbells. The higher you go on the door the more money there is. The folks who design those little windows you see at the top of a good door? Billionaires. I knew one of ‘em once, he’s got 8 houses in about 10 different countries. But he wasn’t there that night – the night I met Cheeky. That’s what I called her. Cheeky. ‘Cause she had these big fat chipmunk cheeks, even though she was thin as a shoe lace. She was dancin with one of her teachers, some guy who taught something silly. Social Studies or Science Fair. I could tell she didn’t like him much. I just knew. We just knew those things about each other. If you just know those things about each other, the rest is easy. It’s pie. And good God could she bake a pie.”

            The 30-bus arrived, as if out of nowhere. It didn’t drive down the street and stop like most busses do. It materialized out of thin air, its red and blue chrome exterior shining like a fresh bruise. The old man asked me if it was my bus. I said it was. But I let the words hang in the air so long that the bus disappeared. I looked down the street for it but it was nowhere to be found. That bus was on its own path, doing its own thing. I had my own paths and things to do.

            “Are you and Cheeky still together?” I asked.

            “’scuse me?”

            “You and Cheeky, are you still together?”

            The old man smiled. “Cheeky,” he said. “Haven’t heard that name come out a mouth other than my own in ages.” He snapped open his lighter and inspected the flame, within an inch of his eyeball. He snapped it closed just before it singed his lashes. “It was never the same after the war,” he said. “The old war changed Cheeky.”

            “Iraq?” I asked.

            The old man laughed. “It was a local war. A turf war. Two big stores in a too-small town. Everyone had to pick a side. If you didn’t you got caught in the crossfire. Cheeky got caught in the crossfire.”

            “She was killed?” I asked.

            “Well she certainly wasn’t saved,” he said. “She was the one. She was the only one. Bigger than a Christmas tree; light on her feet like a lemur. Tougher than a sack of bricks; sweet like a rhubarb pie. If you get one like that, and you get her close, hold on for dear life. I let go. Now there’s nothing left to grab hold of.”

            I fell asleep that night with the old man’s words ringing in my ears. It was the first time I’d slept since the psych ward called about my dad. They said, he was dead. They said, he’d died.

           I hadn’t heard his name out loud in years. But until the phone rang, he was alive.

– Michael Knapp