Any Minute by Meyer Joyce Bedford Deborah Page B

on the sidewalk, his mom shook her head. “So now you’ve met Lauren Davis. You mustn’t let her bother you. That woman would give up her own child if it meant she could get her hands on my accounts.”
    Mitchell wasn’t sure what that meant. “Is she like Ryan Thompson in my class? He pushes me against the fence whenever I do better in Math Minute than he does.”
    “Ryan Thompson pushes you against the fence? You never told me that.”
    “He does.”
    “Have you talked to Mrs. Georges about it?”
    “Of
course
not, Mom.” What was she thinking? “If I did, they’d all know I
squealed
.”
    “I see your point. You’re going to have to figure out a way to make him stop then. And, yes. It’s the same thing.”
    His mom handed him his lemonade. Mitchell chewed his straw as they turned the corner. Suddenly he felt hemmed in by the giant buildings. The Chicago Board of Trade clock gawked down from the end of the street. As he watched, the clock’s minute hand jerked from Roman numeral III to Roman numeral IV.
    “Mom. Did you see that? Another minute just went by.”
    She’d been gulping her coffee in great mouthfuls, hardly stopping to swallow as they’d hurried along. Upon hearing his words, she picked up her pace.
    “No, Mom,” he said. “I didn’t mean we were supposed to hurry up and catch it. I mean, we
missed
it.” At school, Mrs. Georges had been teaching them about space-time continuums. It wasn’t on the second-grade curriculum, she’d confessed as she drew some sort of chart that looked like a jumping spider on the blackboard, but her son was getting his doctorate in mathematical physics. She thought it only fair that she share with her class what she and her family often talked about around the dinner table.
    “No, we didn’t miss that minute. We were right here. We were talking.”
    “But I just saw it go by. And we didn’t
do
anything with it.”
    “No, and we won’t do anything with the next one either if you don’t hurry up.”
    Mitchell stopped short. Some charity had placed a used-clothing bin in the middle of the sidewalk. Mitchell took his mom’s hand as they made their way around it.
    On the other side they almost ran into an old man who was digging inside a metal door marked Shoes Only! He clutched one scuffed wingtip oxford in his hand and apparently was searching to find its mate.
    His mom didn’t approve, he could tell. “Don’t they realize they ought to put these in places where the homeless stay, not in the financial district?” She gave the man a wide berth. “No one wants these people to turn up here.”
    The man found his other shoe. He dropped to the ground and positioned his backside on the edge of a windowsill to try them on. He rolled up frayed pants to reveal bare ankles. He wiggled his toes into the shoes and shoved them the rest of the way on. He yanked the shoelaces into neat loops and stood proudly to test them out, putting his weight first on one foot and then the other. The shoes were too big, but that didn’t seem to matter. He glanced up at Mitchell, wanting some opinion. Their eyes met.
    Mitchell could tell the old man had been sleeping under a bridge or something. He wore ancient clothes that were very dirty, his sleeves rubbed thin at the elbows, and his shirt didn’t have much of a hem. He was missing a good number of teeth, and what teeth he
did
have protruded from his gums at slight angles. He walked with a slight stoop, and he smelled bad, and his scalp showed through a very small amount of gray, grease-caked hair. What hair he lacked on his head, he made up for in his bushy brows. Silver strands stuck straight out from the bony ridges over the man’s eyes, stiffer than kittens’ whiskers. Mitchell figured the man hadn’t had a bath for days. He would like going without one himself sometime, but being clean and looking proper at all times was very important to his mom. Mitchell thought perhaps that was why his mom seemed so irritated at