The rain started at 8:47 PM and did not stop for three hours. Maggie O'Sullivan knew the exact time because she had been watching the clock on the laundromat wall while folding a pile of sheets that belonged to someone who could afford a dryer.

Her phone had been buzzing for twenty minutes. She knew who it was. Her mother called every Sunday, and Sundays in Brooklyn when you are broke are longer than Sundays anywhere else.

She let it go to voicemail. She had done this four times that week.

The laundromat was on Fulton Street, near the corner where a bodega sold both lottery tickets and expired yogurt. Maggie was twenty-four, three months behind on rent, and wearing a sweater that had been a sweater before it became a sweater with holes in the elbows. She had chosen textile design in college because her grandmother had studied it and because Maggie had never been good at saying no to people who loved her. She was still not good at it.

When she left the laundromat, the rain was coming down hard enough that her shoes filled with water within two blocks. She walked without an umbrella because umbrellas were seven dollars at the bodega and seven dollars was the difference between eating that week and eating rice with soy sauce.

She turned down a street she did not know and found herself in front of a 24-hour diner that had a flickering neon sign and a bench outside that was wet but not, she decided, unusable.

She sat. The rain made a sound like static. She took out her phone and looked at a text from her roommate, Priya: "did you pay the electric bill? landlord is asking."

Maggie typed: "will do tomorrow."

She did not have tomorrow. She had the text from her mother waiting in her voicemail, which probably said something like "your aunt knows a nice boy in Cambridge" and "when are you coming home" and "your grandmother asks about you."

A man sat down on the other end of the bench. He was tall and thick-shouldered in the way that comes from carrying heavy things for a living. He wore a jacket that was too thin for the weather and had the kind of face that looked tired even when he was not looking at anything difficult.

He had a paper cup of coffee in his hands and was staring at the street with the expression of someone waiting for something that was not coming.

Maggie looked at him. He looked at her. Neither of them looked away first, which is the unspoken rule of sitting on a wet bench in Brooklyn at ten o'clock on a Tuesday.

"Terrible night for walking," he said. His voice was rough around the edges, like he did not use it often.

"Terrible night for anything," Maggie said.

He nodded, as if this was an answer to a question she had not asked.

They sat in silence for a while. The rain did not slow. The neon sign flickered. Somewhere down the street, a bus hissed to a stop and picked up a passenger who was probably going home to an empty apartment.

"My name's Derek," he said eventually.

"Maggie."

"Maggie," he repeated, as if testing the weight of it. "That's a good name. Irish?"

"My mother's side. My father's side is whoever my mother decided it was in any given year."

He smiled. It was a small smile, not the kind of smile that people use in photographs. "I get that."

"Get what?"

"The not knowing part. My dad was from Philadelphia. My mom was from Queens. They were together for six months and then they weren't. I don't really know him."

"That's alright. My grandmother says you are what you make of yourself, which is either inspiring or a threat depending on whether you have the means to make anything."

"Do you have the means?"

"Not currently."

"Fair answer."

She looked at him properly for the first time. He had a scar on his left eyebrow and hands that looked like they had done work — real work, the kind that leaves marks. He was not unattractive. He was not handsome in a way that made people notice him in a crowd. He was the kind of man you noticed after you had already forgotten he was there, which is sometimes worse.

"You studying?" he asked, nodding at the fabric sample book that was on the bench between them.

"Textile design. Pratt. I am not currently studying because I am currently behind on tuition, but the book stays because I refuse to let my grandmother's influence die in my apartment."

"Textile design. That's real work. Someone has to make the clothes people wear."

"People have to wear something. There is a difference between making and wearing."

He considered this. "Yeah. I think there is."

The rain showed no sign of stopping. The bench was wet. Maggie's shoes were full of water. She had a voicemail from her mother and an electric bill and a landlord who was asking questions and a fabric sample book that was the only thing connecting her to a grandmother she had known for eleven months before she died.

Derek finished his coffee, set the cup on the bench, and stood up. "I should go. My apartment is five blocks that way. If you need a ride, I live nearby. Not that you need a ride. You are clearly capable of walking in the rain."

She looked at his truck parked on the street — a battered Ford with a dent in the passenger door and a bumper sticker that said I DO MY OWN OIL CHANGE in faded letters.

"Are you offering to give me a ride?" she asked.

"Are you asking?"

She thought about saying no. She thought about the walk home in the rain, the dark stairs of her building, the single light bulb in the hallway that had been flickering for a month and nobody had fixed because fixing things costs money.

"No," she said. "I am not asking. But if you were offering, it would be nice."

He got out of the truck, walked to the umbrella rack in the bodega across the street, and came back with the cheapest umbrella they had — a flimsy thing with a bent rib that would probably break in the first gust of wind.

"Better than nothing," he said.

They walked together for two blocks before she turned left toward her building and he went right. At the corner, he stopped.

"Maggie."

She turned.

"Good luck with the textile thing. Your grandmother sounds like a real one."

"She was," she said. And then, because she did not know why she was saying it: "My mother is trying to set me up with someone in Cambridge. I don't want to go."

"Then don't go."

"It's not that simple."

"Nothing is. But not going is simpler than going."

She watched him walk away, then turned and went upstairs to an apartment that smelled of Priya's curry and damp drywall. Her phone had three new voicemails. She listened to the first one.

"Lizzy, sweetheart, your aunt's nephew is a nice boy, he works at a bank in Cambridge, and I know you said you have someone, but people change, and you should not close doors before —"

Maggie turned off the phone. She sat on the edge of her bed in the dark and ate a bowl of rice with soy sauce and thought about the man in the truck who had bought her an umbrella and told her not to go to Cambridge when she had never met anyone from a truck in her life.

She did not sleep well that night. She dreamed of a Ford truck with a dent in the passenger door, driving through rain that never stopped, on a road that had no destination.

In the morning, her mother called again. Maggie let it go to voicemail. She opened her fabric sample book, looked at a swatch of wool that cost more than she would spend on food this week, and decided that not going to Cambridge was not the same as going somewhere else. It was just not going. And sometimes not going is the only direction you have.

Author Note & Copyright: