Lou's shop is empty at 3:07 on a Tuesday afternoon and the door chimes when I come in, because Lou has an actual bell — not a buzzer, not a motion sensor, a real small brass bell on a mounted arm that's been there since 1971 and which I would bet money he polishes.

"Put it on the counter, Rena," he says, without turning around.

"It's coffee."

"I know it's coffee. You bring me coffee on Tuesdays."

I put the mug on the counter. Medium roast, black, no nonsense.[^1] I keep his mug behind my own counter now, which is a thing I started doing in February without deciding to — his mug lives on my shelf, next to Noah's wooden scoop, and when I take it off the shelf I bring it back like I'm loaning it out.

Lou is sweeping.

This is not, in itself, remarkable. Lou sweeps the way other men breathe. I have watched him sweep his shop, through my front window, through his front window, for eighteen months, at irregular intervals that have no relationship to whether the floor is dirty. The floor is almost never dirty. Lou sweeps it anyway.

What I notice, standing there with my empty hands, is that the shop is empty.

Not closed. The OPEN sign is still in the window. The red-and-white barber pole is still turning outside. But there is not a single person in one of the two barber chairs, and there is not a single person on the long bench against the wall where men wait their turn, and there is not even a magazine pulled out of the rack. The rack is full. Every magazine is aligned. I can see, from here, that the spines read Field & Stream, Field & Stream, Popular Mechanics, Field & Stream.

"Slow day?" I say.

Lou's broom pauses.

It's a tiny pause. If I were not standing in his shop watching for it, I would not have caught it. But I am standing in his shop watching for it, because I can already feel that something is happening here that I don't have the shape of yet.

"Got a—" Lou says, and then stops. "Got some work to do. This afternoon."

He resumes sweeping.

"Okay," I say.

I should leave. I'm not a customer. He didn't ask me to stay. But I don't leave, because my eyes have caught up with the room, and now I'm seeing things I missed when I first walked in.

The chair on the left — Lou's chair, the one he uses, the one that's been his since he bought this shop from a man named Gus in 1983[^2] — has fresh paper on the headrest. White. Clean. Laid flat. The paper that was there when I walked in yesterday bringing him a slice of Milly's pie is gone. This paper is new.

His scissors are laid out on the counter. Not in the drawer. Not in the sterilizer jar. On the counter. In a row. The small ones. The longer ones. The thinning shears that look like they could do surgery. A comb next to them. A spray bottle next to the comb. He has, I realize, set up. The way a person sets up when they know someone is coming.

The clock says 3:09.

"Lou," I say, before I mean to. "Do you have an appointment?"

He sweeps. Doesn't answer.

Then he says: "Four o'clock."

"Okay."

He sweeps some more.

I want to ask. I can feel the shape of the question trying to come out of my mouth and I am holding it in with something I will later recognize as the first actually adult impulse I've had in months, which is: it is not your business and he doesn't want you to ask and your wanting to know is not the same thing as being entitled to know.

I look at the chair.

I look at the scissors.

I look at the floor, which is clean, which he is sweeping again anyway.

And the thing I'm thinking — I can't help it, my brain is doing its thing — is Matthew 6:3. When thou doest alms, let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth. I used to think that verse was about secrecy. About keeping score of the things you weren't keeping score of, which is its own kind of score. I don't think that anymore. I think it's about this. I think it's about a seventy-three-year-old man sweeping an already-clean floor at 3:09 on a Tuesday because somebody is coming in at 4 and he wants the floor to be clean when they get here and he doesn't need anyone to know about it. Including the person coming in.

I don't say any of this.

I say: "See you Thursday, Lou."

"Thursday," Lou says.

I walk out. The bell chimes. I nearly step off the curb into a Subaru Outback that honks at me for a full two seconds and I wave at the driver with what I hope is an apologetic face and not a guilty one, because what I am actually feeling is guilty, like I've been somewhere I wasn't invited.

I cross the street.

I go back to my own counter. I pick up a cloth. I wipe the espresso machine. There are no customers in my shop either — the Tuesday 3-to-4 window is one of the slowest of the week, which is why I can leave to run coffee across the street, which is why I was there in the first place. I wipe the steam wand. I rinse the pitcher. I reorganize the syrup bottles, which were already organized, which I reorganized yesterday, which I will probably reorganize tomorrow.

I find myself wanting to text Jennifer.

I find myself composing, in my head, exactly the sentence I would send: So I just went to Lou's and I think he's—

I stop.

The sentence stops because I've realized, mid-compose, that telling Jennifer — telling anyone — would be a kind of theft. Lou gave the haircut. Or he's about to. He didn't give me the story. The story isn't mine to pass around. Generosity done in secret is generosity that stays in secret, or else it isn't the same thing anymore. It turns into something else. Something smaller.

I delete the sentence I was going to type and I didn't type and doesn't exist.

I keep wiping the espresso machine, which is, at this point, the cleanest object in the northern Midwest.

At 3:58 I look up. I don't mean to. I just do. And through my window and across the street and through Lou's window, I see a woman walk up to the shop holding the hand of a boy who looks like he's maybe twelve. The boy is looking at his feet. The woman pats his shoulder, says something to him, points at the door. He goes in alone.

She walks back to a car parked at the curb.

The bell on Lou's door chimes. I can't hear it from here but I know it did.

I turn away from the window.

I do not watch the haircut. It is not mine to watch.

I pick up the cloth. I wipe the counter. I hum something, I don't know what. And I stand in my own shop, in the slowest hour of the week, and I think about how I have lived across the street from a man for eighteen months who has probably been doing this exact thing once a month, twice a month, for forty years, and I would never know, because he would never tell me, because the whole point is that nobody is supposed to know.

Lou sweeps again, later, at 5:15, when nobody's there. I know because I look up and see him through the window.

I pretend I don't.

[^1]: He tipped me a quarter the first time I brought it across the street in February. He has tipped me a quarter every Tuesday since. I have never spent one of them.

[^2]: He keeps a framed photograph of Gus on the back wall of the shop. I have never asked about it. I have a feeling, eventually, I will be told.