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The town this store was in was three towns away from where Artie lived; it was a wealthy town, with many large and very old wooden houses, not unlike parts of the town that Artie lived in, where the large wooden houses were so old that their fronts went right up close to the sidewalks. The downtown area was pristine, with a square in the middle and a large brick post office.

It was Wednesday, which meant that Evie was working late; this was two days after they had had their fight. Artie needed a new shirt. Evie was the one who tended to notice when he needed a new shirt, but she had said nothing recently about his shirts that had fraying cuffs or collars—and so he had gone three towns away to enter this men’s clothing store that had painted on its front window the simple word SCHWARTZ’S. He had been here before, but not for many years.

“I need a shirt,” Artie said. The owner showed Artie some options and, after a moment, suggested that he try one on, and so Artie walked into the dressing room and pulled the curtain closed and took off his own shirt and put the new shirt on. As he looked in the mirror, a deep sadness came to Artie. He looked like his father; he could see this now. His pale brown hair was full, and his eyes peered back at him through his large glasses. And his stomach was getting as big as his father’s stomach had been throughout Artie’s life.

But in spite of his stomach, the shirt fit, it was okay, and Artie took it off and went and bought it. The owner folded the shirt carefully, placing it into a paper bag that had twine handles and the name of the shop printed on the side. Artie thanked him and turned to go.

Another man and his (apparently) wife had come into the shop and were speaking now to the owner, and Artie stopped close by the front door where there were dress shirts placed in a semicircle on a little table there, they were nicer shirts than the one he had just bought. He peered through his glasses and found two in his size and turned back around, holding them in the air, saying to the owner, “Mind if I try these on as well?” And the man looked over from where he stood with the couple and said, “Oh, go right ahead.”

Back inside the dressing room Artie stood. But he did not try on the other shirts. After a few moments he heard the couple leaving the store, and everything got quiet. He slipped the two shirts into the bag on top of the one he had just bought earlier, and then he sat down on the little bench behind the curtain. What am I doing?, he thought. But his mind felt blurred, as though he were not really present.

After a moment he stood up and walked out of the dressing room, nodding at the man behind the counter, and the man said, “How did they work out?” And Artie said, “They didn’t. I left them in the dressing room, sorry.” And the small and slender man in his nice dark suit said, “Don’t worry, have a good day then,” and Artie said, “You too.” He still felt a sense of being bizarrely far away. As he stepped through the shop’s front door, a loud buzzer went off, and Artie experienced both an immediate terror and bewilderment, and it was not until he saw the man, who had been behind the counter, approach him that Artie had the full understanding of what had occurred. He had just been caught shoplifting.

—

The owner, this Mr. Charles Schwartz, walked over to Artie and stood looking at him. Then he reached high up by the side of the door, touching something, and the horrible buzzer stopped. “Come with me, please,” he said, and Artie followed him to the back of the store. They stepped into a room that looked as though it was a storage place; a few boxes were lined up on a shelf, and an ironing board was out. The owner nodded toward a wooden chair, and Artie sat down. Artie’s face was very moist with perspiration, and he was aware of his heartbeat, which seemed extraordinarily fast. This older man, who wore his dark-framed glasses, this man looked at him with piercing eyes from behind those glasses; there was nothing special about the man’s eyes, later Artie could not even recall the color of them, but they looked deeply into Artie, searchingly, and Artie felt this and did not look away.

And then the man said, “Do you mind giving me your license for a moment?”

Artie fumblingly took his wallet from his pocket, he saw that his hand was shaking as he tried and then did get the license from it, and he handed it to the man. “Thank you,” the man said courteously, and then added, “Stay right here for a few moments, and I’ll be back, okay?” Artie nodded his head. The man reached down and took the bag from next to the chair where Artie had placed it, and then he left Artie alone in this storage room. As he sat there, in the chair, Artie felt a sense of such severe disorientation that he wondered if he had had a small stroke.

Bizarrely, he recalled—as he sat there, his palms sweating as he held his hands in his lap—an elderly couple he had seen at the Bangor airport in Maine the previous summer; he and Evie had been returning from a vacation. The old man was very large and had suspenders that ran a little crookedly up his back, and the woman was not as big, but she was not small, and oh, she loved that very large man. Artie had watched her walk slowly across the floor to him with a cup of coffee and a sandwich, he had watched while they shared the sandwich, he had watched while she reached behind the huge man to arrange his suspenders; she smoothed them down his massive back. And then she leaned her head against his shoulder, and this is what stabbed Artie now, their innocence, and how badly he wanted—as that elderly woman had—to lean his head against a loving person, to be innocent and incorruptible.

—

He stayed sitting, then wiped his face with one hand. On a small table near him was a box of Kleenex, but Artie did not dare take one, he was afraid he was being watched on a camera, and he did not even dare look around to see if this might be true. He just sat. And then—horribly—he felt his lower lip tremble. He could not control it. It kept shaking downward.

—

Meanwhile, Charles Schwartz, owner for thirty-seven years of this small men’s store, sat in an office right next to the room in which Artie was sitting. Charles Schwartz had seen many things over his lifetime, many people he had dealt with in this store. Then, as he googled the man’s name, Arthur Dam, he saw a number of things about him being Teacher of the Year five years ago, and then Charles Schwartz ran another search on him, and he was not surprised to find that this Arthur Dam had no criminal record at all. He sat for a few moments and then returned to the man.

Charles Schwartz sat down in a chair, moving it close to the one that Artie sat in, and gave him back his license. Artie returned it to his wallet, and Charles Schwartz was struck by the intense pain on this man’s face. He said quietly, “Mr. Dam. I’m going to let you go now, okay?” Artie just watched him.

They sat in silence for a few moments, and the man—this Mr. Schwartz—said, “In my time I’ve seen this kind of thing, and it often comes after a loss of some sort. I’m not going to ask you one thing about your life, okay? You just get up and leave—oh, here, with the shirt you bought—” He removed the two stolen shirts and handed the bag back to Artie. “And then when you come back in someday, you just pay for whatever you get, okay then?”

“Okay.” Artie said it very quietly.

Artie stood, but his legs were shaking, and he sat back down. “Would you like some water?” the man asked, and Artie whispered, “No thank you.” And then Artie stood again and moved to the door, and the man followed him and opened the door for him, and then he said—Artie would never forget this—he said to Artie with great kindness in his voice, “You take care now, okay?”

Artie walked to his car and drove away. He had to keep pulling over until he could stop shaking, but cars honked behind him each time, the streets were crowded.

—

When he arrived home, he took out the plate of food that Evie had left him in the refrigerator, but he did not microwave it, he sat at the kitchen table and ate cold fish. His mind felt not right. After he finished, he scraped the remains into the garbage and then sat back down at the table. Then he moved into the living room and sat there in the dark. It was not until he saw Evie turning in to the driveway that he got up and switched on a light.

Evie said, as soon as she stepped through the door, “Artie, are you okay? Why was the house dark?”

“Taking a nap,” he said.

“You were?” She hung her coat up and came into the living room.

Artie said, “I went to buy myself a shirt.”

“You did?”

“Yeah, I just thought I needed a shirt, so I went to that place—” And he named the store, and Evie said, “Wow, good for you.”

As Evie put her own plate into the microwave and then sat and ate her dinner, Artie sat at the kitchen table across from her. He asked how her day had gone, and she told him, and he was so grateful for her chatty presence that he could not believe it, he could not believe anything. Including the fact that apparently, to his wife, he appeared as normal as ever. He felt again (almost) as though he had suffered a stroke, that something marked him now as very different. That she could not seem to see this astonished him.