The rain was due at half past four. At twenty past, Mr Dwyer stood in the Devon town square and told me it would miss us altogether.
He was still looking at the sky when the first drops struck the pavement. The boy beside him pulled his schoolbag under his blazer. Across the square, the woman from the bakery dragged a plastic crate away from the edge of her awning.
I had a message from my manager asking if I could cover Saturday. My mother and I had arranged to go to the garden centre. She had been talking about a particular rose for weeks, although she could never remember its name. I put the phone back in my pocket without answering.
The rain came sideways. The boy ducked under the awning, and I followed him. Mr Dwyer sheltered beneath a bus sign, where the water ran off the top and down his collar.
“There's room here,” I called.
He came across with his shopping trolley, apologising to the bakery woman for blocking her doorway. She shifted a chair out from inside the shop and set it against the wall.
“Your app tell you where the bus is?” he asked me.
The little bus on the screen appeared to be resting in a field. I showed him.
“Driver's got the right idea,” he said, though he kept looking up the road.
The boy had taken out his phone too. He shook it, wiped the screen on his sleeve and looked at the timetable fixed to the pole. A gust lifted one corner of the paper and pasted it back against the plastic.
“Does this one go past the leisure centre?” he asked.
Mr Dwyer began to describe a route along the river. The bakery woman stopped him.
“That hasn't gone there for ages.” She went inside and returned with a pen and a receipt. “Ask for this stop. It's just round the corner from the pool.”
The boy photographed what she had written, then folded the receipt into his pocket. His sister was waiting after swimming, he told us. Their dad was working late, and she had already sent him three messages asking where he was.
The bakery woman glanced at the clock above her counter. “I've got a daughter to collect myself.”
“You should go,” I said.
She hesitated, then took off her apron and fetched her coat. While she pulled down the blind and locked the shop, Mr Dwyer started rubbing his knee.
I drew the chair up to him. “Sit down until it comes.”
He lowered himself onto it, keeping one hand on the trolley. The bakery woman gave me a quick nod and ran across the square, holding her coat over her head.
My phone buzzed again. My manager had added a question mark. I wrote that I couldn't do Saturday. The answer came back almost at once: No worries, I'll ask Jo. I stared at it for a moment, then sent my mother a message asking whether she wanted to leave at ten.
The bus came at five, wipers beating. The boy stepped aboard and asked the driver about the stop on the receipt. The driver nodded and the boy disappeared down the aisle, already typing to his sister.
Mr Dwyer stood slowly. He took my arm at the kerb and caught hold of the rail inside the bus. The driver waited while I tucked the chair close against the bakery wall, out of the rain.
My mother replied as I got on: ten was fine. She had remembered the rose. It was called something like Jubilee, she said, and she would know it when she saw it.
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