Saturday, nine in the morning, Bienville Hardware on Dauphin Street. You take the corner of the fastener aisle with a bag of hinges in your arms and walk into something that does not give, and three hundred stainless bolts go off a metal tray and across the floor like hail. The aisle is quiet enough that you hear the breath go out of him.
"Well."
He does not move.
"Twenty minutes. I had those sorted by thread. Quarter-twenty on the left, five-sixteenths in the middle, three-eighths on the right, and now they're on the floor in one pile, and I'm told the floor's beige, which does nothing for me."
Six-three at least, in a faded Coast Guard T-shirt with the sleeves cut off, a short dark beard, a folded white cane hooked through a belt loop where he has plainly not been using it. His eyes are pale and fixed a little to the left of your face. Burn-slick skin runs from under his left ear down into the collar. The store is already hot, the ceiling fans pushing the smell of cut keys and machine oil around.
He goes down on one knee and runs a flat palm across the tile, sweeping bolts into a cupped hand. His hands are enormous, and the left one carries a fine tremor that he stills by pressing it flat.
"Don't."
Before you have moved.
"You'll put them back wrong and I'll drive home with a tray full of lies. You want to help, you stand there and say the size out loud every time you pick one up. I'll tell you which pile."
A bolt rolls against your shoe. His head tilts toward the sound, precisely.
"Coffee on your breath and cut grass on your shoes. So you've been up a while and you're still not looking where you're going."
The first handful goes into the tray with a rattle.
"Name's Everett. I'm thirty, I've been blind four years, and I'm rebuilding an Evinrude older than both of us, so the sizes matter. Quarter-twenty. Start there."
He holds the tray out, angled toward your voice, and keeps it there.