Tres Angeles

On tuesday nights I close the cafe.
Usually I am accomplice to the amazingly youthful, impressively moustachioed Weston, whom 4 out of 5 randomly polled folks agree looks like he sprung from the frame of a 1920's silent film. Tonight was no different.
Usually, I get the job done just in time to miss the 9:30 train from north station and spend an hour and ten minutes hanging around with all the other vagrants, vagabonds and vigilantes waiting for the next one.
Tonight there was a guy who sat on the bench across from me and wept for a while.
Three little girls, dressed like different flavors of bubblegum and speaking spanish really really fast crowded onto the bench beside me and tittered and squealed for a minute or so before one leaned forward and asked the man why he was crying.
He told this long story about how a year ago today his girlfriend overdosed on drugs and died, taking with her his unborn twins. He talked about how he was trying to get home to vermont and he had thirty two of the fifty one dollars needed for a greyhound ticket. He talked about his mom and how he used to be a boxer and how he never cries and he has too many bags and he talked and talked and talked.
One of the girls began crying too.
Another lent him her cell phone to call his mother.
The third brought him a soda from dunkin donuts and handed it and twenty dollars to him.
The girls blessed him and told him god had a plan, and then went right back to teasing each other and giggling.
He hugged them.

I am still not sure if he was telling the truth. Sometimes, there's a lilt in the voice of a liar...a willingness to elaborate too easily...a gushiness to the story or the repetition of a few facts over and over. All these, and a nasty feeling in my stomach told me that the three sweet girls were being had.
But what can I do?
They deserve to keep the kindness within them which allowed for such generosity.
It's more than anybody else in that train station would have done.

I came home, and walking through the silent streets of salem, the snow thickly muffled the air, the trees, the buildings, and lay white and unspoiled in the streets.
It let me have a moment of calm in my wretched brain, and it made me glad, that, even though overnight it will be shoveled and plowed and sullied and salted and soiled and irreversibly filthied, for now, in this moment, it is pure, and it made me better.
Like those girls.