Joe was tired of pancakes.

Every morning, his wife made pancakes, then she sat there, knitting, while he ate. She asked about work, she talked about her day, and she finished 3.5 rows of her newest scarf just as he finished his coffee. She always started halfway through a row, and Joe wondered how she could do that—the same thing every day. The thought made him twinge.

Of course, he never said he was tired of pancakes. Because he did like them. And he felt full after he ate them. Plus his wife’s talking made it tough to complain; it was easier to mm-hmm and chew than to put his pancake issues into words.

“I’m going to Marcy’s today,” she said, her eyes on the pile of bright pink yarn in her lap. “I’m running out of yarn.”

“Mmh-hmm,” he mumbled through his coffee. He set his empty cup on the table as she finished her last half row.

He grabbed his lunch, wondering if she was tired of pancakes, too. He walked to the door, took his coat from the closet, and turned back, about to ask, when he saw her washing his breakfast dishes. She was singing with the radio station playing in the background. She was content. Comfortable.

He held his question for later and left.

Joe walked down to Delaware Avenue, then turned right. He passed the police station, the power company, his church, Marcy’s store, and the dentist. The entire walk was ten blocks. City Hall was eighty years old, and Joe had been working there for thirty. His coworkers mocked him for being the old man who still walked to work, but Joe couldn’t see any reason to drive.

The last corner on Delaware had a bus stop where some of his coworkers who lived across town got off. The stop was in front of the abandoned Office of the Italian Vice-Consulate, and Joe often watched the people getting off the bus there. Sometimes they were his work buddies, and they would walk the rest of the way together. Sometimes they were old ladies, looking for Marcy’s. Sometimes they were teenagers skipping school.

Today, the only person who stepped off the bus was a woman with dark hair, holding the hand of a toddler. The child had the same dark hair, but when she looked up at Joe, her blue eyes looked watery and scared.

The woman walked the toddler right up to the embassy door and grabbed the handle to pull, but nothing happened. She looked up at a sign, knocked hard on the glass, then pulled the door again. She was expecting the embassy to be open, but it had moved a year ago.

“Hey, that place is closed,” Joe said.

“No,” she said, turning her face to Joe, where he could see the same watery blue eyes he saw in the child. “Tu non capisci. Loro possono aiutarci.”

“They moved,” he said. “To Niagara Falls.”

Joe heard the sound of another bus opening its doors behind him. He turned to see if this one had his coworkers on board. Two women in office attire walked off, then a man in a t-shirt. The man was big, taller than Joe, with bright blue eyes. Joe could see the print of his gun through his jeans. The embassy woman behind him gasped, and the t-shirt man caught her eye. She grabbed the child up into her arms and ran. She turned left into the alleyway between the embassy and the dentist’s office, and the man took off after her.

Joe hesitated.

He started to think about whether to follow them.

And then he ran. The thinking could wait.

Joe’s fifty-five-year-old body wasn’t ready for the running, but adrenaline pushed him down the alleyway as he tried to keep pace with them. The woman was hollering, the man was gaining on her, and the child was bouncing in her arms. The weight of the child kept her from running faster, and so Joe managed to get within ten feet of them just as the man caught the woman by the hair.

“No! Stop!” Joe yelled, tripping over a tree root. He pitched forward, face first, reaching his arms out, as if he could grab the man’s belt to drag him down. But Joe’s face landed in the dirt, and the man and the woman disappeared behind the next house.

Joe stood and felt himself over. He wasn’t broken. His coat was torn. His right shoe had flown off and landed five feet behind him. And his lunch was smashed. He had fallen right on it.

He couldn’t catch them. His running days were over. He trudged down to the police station, where an officer wrote up a report and took Joe’s name. Then Joe went to work, uncomfortable with his defeat.

Telling the police made Joe feel better, but he still looked awful in his torn coat. After work, he stopped at Marcy’s, where he bought a few patches and a zipper. At the register, Marcy told him that his wife had come in earlier to buy yarn. Marcy said she’d been excited to get more pink.

When Joe got home, his wife gasped at his appearance.

“You worked like this all day?” she asked, rummaging through a drawer.

“It’s ok,” he said. “I’m not hurt.”

She helped him take his coat off, then she sat at the table and opened a plastic container. It was full of thread, and she moved spools aside until she found the right one.

“Sit. I’ll fix this,” she said, feeding a brown thread through the eye of a large sewing needle. “And then we’ll have dinner. What do you want?”

Joe hesitated.

He sat in a chair. The leather seat was torn, but it was comfortable.

“Pancakes,” he said. “Let’s have pancakes again.”