There was so much to see, hear, feel, smell, taste in New York, we were overwhelmed. By dinner on the fourth day the kids said they were done. They weren’t doing another thing.

It was so pretty that, when we left the restaurant, Times Square glowing in the spring twilight, I told them we should stay, walk around a little.

“You can stay,” my daughter said. “I’m going back to the hotel.”

Her father and brother went with her but I stayed, watched people dressed as cartoon characters getting their pictures taken, but what was the point of seeing something if there was no one to talk about it with afterwards?

On the way back to the hotel I passed a chain store that sold the colored T-shirts my husband likes and went in to get him some. A pretty young girl in a black-and-white referee’s uniform named Hannah took charge of me at the door, escorted me to the T-shirts. What colors did my husband like, she wanted to know. Where did I live, and what was there to do in Walla Walla, what a funny name.

My daughter needed socks, I remembered, and Hannah helped me pick them out. She told me I didn’t look old enough to be the mother of a 14-year-old, expressed even more surprise when I said I also had a 17-year-old son.

Just the sort of attention I like, and I was sorry when I couldn’t think of anything else to buy and Hannah placed the socks on top of the T-shirts, said, “She’s going to love these,” and walked me to the checkout.

“James,” Hannah said to the man behind the cash register, “this is Cathy. She’s from Walla Walla.”

The man behind the cash register was small, too small for a referee’s uniform, because he wore a polo shirt and sweat pants. Like a toddler’s, I thought, noting the Velcro fasteners on his shoes. His helplessness increased his resemblance to an actual baby, trussed as he was in the high-backed wheelchair that held him, even his head, in a vise.

“Ah, Walla Walla.” His damp and tinny sounding voice came from a box. Another machine breathed for him. “Known for its onions and burgeoning wine industry.”

“He can think of something to say to everybody,” Hannah told me proudly.

“Not to you,” James said to her from his machine, and I wondered if in his own head his voice sounded deep, humorous, tender. “There, words fail me.”

Hannah held the shirts in front of the computer. James blinked his left eyelid and the computer screen on the cash register began to whirr.

His puffy fingers remained splayed out on his lap while his eyes scanned the register screen and Hannah held up the socks. James reviewed the screen one last time before saying, “Thirty-eight dollars and ninety-eight cents, please,” and I began searching for my credit card.

“Mighty famous prison in Walla Walla,” he said, filling the silence.

Ordinarily I would have said, Yes, that’s where I work, but not to James. No prisoner at the penitentiary was ever so closely confined. A man secured to the restraint bed by leather straps across his chest, knees, ankles, wrists, with a spit sock pulled over his face, had more freedom.

“Imagine your knowing that.”

“I’m showing off for Hannah. She likes the smart ones.”

Hannah made an affectionate, clucking sound when she took my card.

Surely, I told myself, the life James had made for himself was better than being stowed at an institution upstate watching TV, waiting to die.

A handsome young man in a black-and-white referee’s uniform like Hannah’s walked over, smiled, asked me if James had struck out again.

“It isn’t the destination,” I said solemnly. “It’s the journey.”

I was pleased when Hannah and the young man laughed and James’ machine made a high wispy sound that could have been laughter.

He had his friends, his jokes, his quick mind. Could he make that enough?

When I got back to the room my husband, son, and daughter were watching Sponge Bob and eating cannoli, debating whether whipped cream or custard was a better filling.

Jane Snyder’s stories have appeared in Summerset Review, Five On The Fifth, and Pithead Chapel. She is a retired social worker and lives in Spokane.