It is cold.

It is a low concrete ledge about fourteen inches high at the base of a pillar, and it was the middle of January in Minneapolis, and I sat on it in jeans and could feel it through everything within about forty seconds.

He sat there for two years.

Eleven hours a day in the summer and something less than that in the winter, on a folding stool, and I had never once sat down beside him, not for a single minute out of two thousand five hundred.

I put his coffee down on the ledge next to me.