Given World by Marian Palaia

sixty-five dollars left to my name.
    “I don’t know,” Primo said. “You look hungry. I bet you’re hungry, aren’t you?”
    Ravenous. Eat-a-whole-pig hungry. Hungry for food even more than for someone to talk to, though there was that too. “A little bit,” I said, and swallowed.
    “You like donuts?”
    “I like bacon and eggs.” Like my new name, it came out of nowhere.
    He nodded slowly. “Knowing what you like is half the battle.”
    “I’ve just been dreaming about bacon and eggs,” I said. And home, but I didn’t say that part. At home it was breakfast time. My mother’s kitchen, right then, smelled like bacon and eggs. Dad was eating, dragging a piece of toast through yellow yolk, telling her what a good cook she is.
    Dreamt about but not missed. Not allowed to be missed. None of them.
    Primo said he knew a place. Open early. Right by the beach.
    I said, “Aren’t you working?”
    “Yeah, but this is the quiet part of my shift. It’ll be a while before people start calling in.”
    “Calling in where? For what?”
    “The office. For their papers. If the kids don’t deliver them on time, or if they get stolen or wet or something.” And there was always something, he said, but to him it was job security. He was out here to fix these things, and he liked it. He was good at it. Talking to people and working with the kids. He liked to work. This work. And he’d been one of those kids once. He told me all of this without taking a breath. It made me happy, him liking his life like that.
    I tried to picture him as a kid, and he looked exactly the same, only in miniature. Like a third the size he was now, but with exactly the same proportions and features: same shoulders, same hair, same scruffy mustache, same husky voice.
    Primo smiled when I did. “Well, can I buy you breakfast? Or you want me to bring it to you in bed?”
    It took about two seconds to weigh the possibilities. Maybe he was a serial killer or a Bible salesman, but I thought I’d have caught on by then, and truly, I was way too hungry to care.
    “Yes, please,” I said.
    The newspaper truck was really a huge van, all metal on the inside, with the engine cover in the middle next to the driver’s seat. There was no passenger seat. Primo told me he’d always thought the engine cover looked like a doghouse, with no door and a flat top. A doghouse for an aluminum dog. One who could walk through walls, who didn’t need a door. He had a cup of coffee sitting there, surrounded by an impressive array of donut crumbs. There was a metal divider, like a chain-link fence, between the front and the back, but it was open on the passenger side. Primo set a bundle of newspapers in the opening for me to sit on.
    I asked what time he went to work in the morning.
    “Two thirty. Except on Saturdays. I get to sleep in all the way till three on Saturdays.” He had a low, growly laugh.
    “Wow. That’s early.”
    “Yeah, it is. But it’s not so bad once you’re up.”
    He loved being out there most mornings, he said, with the quiet, the occasional cop or taxi or garbage truck. There were the bums too, mostly on Geary, but not nearly so many out in the Richmond district as he’d see passing through the Tenderloin on his way from the plant. In the Tenderloin were those guys, and the pushers down on Golden Gate Avenue with their little glassine bags of white powder. The prostitutes stayed downtown too, he said, chilling around their claimed corners, all fishnet-stockinged and stoned. There had been a bunch of kidnappings and killings the past year or so, but they’d caught the guys who were doing it, they thought; at least the worst of it had stopped for now. He warned me about all the different kinds of trouble a person could get into in the city, told me which neighborhoods were best avoided, especially after dark, and congratulated me on picking a relatively safe one to pitch my encampment in.
    I tried to process it all, to not look startled like