I am not a good kid. My probation officer tells me that twice a month in a room that smells like stale carpet and cheap floor wax, and honestly, he is usually right.

My record has three counts of property damage, a disorderly conduct charge from last November, and enough missed curfew slips to wallpaper my bedroom twice.

People look at me when I walk down Commercial Street with my hood pulled up tight over my ears and they cross the street.

They clutch their purses. They pretend I am invisible until I am safely past them.

I am used to it. I expect it.

The rain that Tuesday afternoon was coming down in thick, heavy sheets that made the streetlights look like blurred yellow bruises against the gray sky.

I was soaked through my canvas jacket before I even made it half a block past the Rexall pharmacy, heading nowhere in particular because staying inside my uncle’s house while he was drinking always made my skin itch.

That was when I saw Arthur standing outside the glass doors of the pharmacy, looking smaller than a grown man has any right to look.

He had a little brown paper sack clutched in both hands against his stomach, holding it like it was made of blown glass that might shatter if the wind hit it wrong.

The bag had that little white pharmacy label stuck to the side with red print, and I knew what was inside before I even got close enough to read it because my grandmother used to carry the exact same ones in her purse before her ticker finally gave out.

Heart medication. The expensive kind that the county health clinic only gives you if you sit on their hard wooden benches for three hours.

Arthur was staring out at the parking lot where the water was already ankle-deep in the dips of the asphalt, rushing toward the storm drains in muddy little rivers.

The bus stop was three long blocks away down Monroe Street, past the car lot and the empty lot where the old grain elevator burned down back when I was eight.

There was no shelter at that particular bus stop, just a rusted metal pole with a faded plastic sign bolted to it and a curb that floods every time the clouds get heavy.

Arthur took one step out into the rain, looked down at his black dress shoes sinking straight into the brown slush, and stepped back under the narrow aluminum awning with a little shake of his head.

I kept walking for about ten feet. My sneakers were already squishing with every step, and the cold water was running down the back of my neck in freezing little drops.

I told myself it was none of my business. I told myself Arthur probably had a son or a neighbor or somebody who was supposed to come get him in a warm Buick.

Then I remembered the way my grandfather used to stand by the kitchen window waiting for my mother to bring him his pills, tapping his knuckles against the glass until the paint chipped off the sill.

I stopped dead in my tracks, turned around on my heel, and walked back up the three concrete steps toward the old man.

He didn’t look up until my shadow fell across the yellow pharmacy floor, and even then he just blinked through glasses that were speckled with rain spray from the street.

I reached into my backpack, unzipped the front pocket where I keep my spare lighter and my greasy wallet, and pulled out the big black golf umbrella my uncle stole from the country club back in July.

I popped the release button and the thing sprang open with a loud crack that made Arthur jump six inches off the tile.

I didn’t say a word. I just stepped right under the canvas next to him, reached out, and took the elbow of his gray wool coat to guide him down the steps and into the gray soup of the sidewalk.

“You’re going to ruin that jacket,” Arthur muttered, his voice sounding like dry leaves being dragged across a concrete driveway.

“It’s already ruined,” I told him, keeping my eyes fixed on the puddle right in front of my left shoe so I didn’t have to look at his face.

We started walking down Monroe Street at the speed of an old clock winding down, slow and uneven, his little black shoes clicking against the wet concrete while my heavy boots went thud, thud, thud.

The wind picked up right as we passed the hardware store, blowing the rain sideways in hard, freezing needles that drove straight through the side of the umbrella.

I shifted the handle four inches to the left, keeping the thickest part of the canvas directly over his silver head and his little brown paper sack.

My right shoulder and the entire right side of my hoodie took the full force of the gale, the cold water soaking through the cotton until it stuck to my skin like wet paper.

Arthur kept trying to lean the handle back toward me, mumbling something about sharing, but I just nudged his elbow gently forward and kept my eyes on the cracks in the pavement.

We didn’t talk much because there wasn’t anything to say that the rain wasn’t already saying louder.

By the time we hit the second block, my right arm was aching from holding the awkward angle against the wind, but I didn’t drop it an inch.

I kept thinking about how light he felt under my hand, like there wasn’t much left of him besides old bones and stubbornness.

We reached the bus stop pole just as the yellow number twelve city bus lumbered around the corner on the avenue, its brakes hissing like a cornered cat as it wallowed through the standing water near the curb.

Arthur stopped by the rusted pole, his breathing coming a little ragged and short, and reached into his coat pocket for his change purse with stiff, red fingers.

I closed the umbrella halfway, let the water slide off the fabric into the grass, and handed the whole black thing right into his trembling hands before he could get his coins sorted out.

Arthur looked down at the handle, then up at my soaked hoodie, his eyebrows drawn together in a tight, confused knot.

“Son, I can’t take this,” he said, trying to push it back toward my chest with his forearm. “This is a good umbrella. Where are you going to get another one?”

“Keep it, Grandpa,” I told him, looking away toward the brick wall across the street where a faded sign for an old laundry still hung by one rusty bolt. “I live right there.”

I pointed my chin toward a vacant brick warehouse with broken windows and a condemned notice stuck to the double doors, a place where nobody had lived since the seventies.

Arthur looked from my face to the empty building, his mouth opening slightly like he wanted to ask how a kid lived in a place with no roof, but the bus driver blew the air brakes twice with a loud, impatient groan.

The accordion doors hissed open, spitting a cloud of warm, oily exhaust out into the rain.

“You get on,” I said, giving him a little shove between his shoulder blades that was a lot rougher than I meant it to be. “The driver’s waiting.”

Arthur climbed up the two high metal steps, his wet shoes squeaking on the rubber mat, and paid his fare with two quarters and a folded dollar bill.

He walked down the narrow aisle toward a window seat near the back, his small brown paper sack held safely in his lap like a sleeping cat.

As the bus pulled away from the curb with a roar of its diesel engine and a heavy spray of muddy water that soaked the cuffs of my jeans, Arthur pressed his face against the side window.

I stood there by the empty metal pole until the red tail lights of the bus faded out behind the gray curtain of the rain on the corner of Elm.

Then I didn’t head toward the vacant warehouse at all because I knew the roof leaked right over the floorboards anyway and my uncle would still be asleep with his boots on.

Instead, I turned my back to the wind, dropped my head down into my collar, and started sprinting five more blocks north toward the alley behind my uncle’s house.

The water was so deep in the dip by the lumber yard that it came up over the tops of my laces and filled my socks with cold grit.

My chest burned from the cold air and the running, and my hair was plastered to my forehead so hard I couldn’t see out of my left eye.

Yet for some reason, as I rounded the corner past the grease-stained dumpster and saw the back screen door hanging open on its single rusty hinge, I found myself whistling through my teeth.

It wasn’t a song anybody would know. Just a couple of flat, broken notes bouncing off the tin siding of the garage while the rain kept coming down without a single sign of stopping.