The pressure in the air stifled the aroma of the simmering meat, the slow-cooked goodness that spread half a block in all directions to capture stomachs from the moment AM shifted to PM. Ounces of flavor settled down to the pavement instead of up up and through the otherwise stale breezes, down down among the cigarette butts and gum splotches.

20 minutes, it would rain. I put up both umbrellas in preparation. I did not need to have old bones or old-man's intuition to know that buckets of water were planning to fall from the sky. Again today, but harder than the spat this morning that had already left dark trails in the windows' dust.

I pushed the meat around a little in spite of the damned rain. These business folks, especially the ones from 120 West, would probably banter something to each other about it being a "forgone conclusion." Some crap high-vocabulary meaningless nonsense. Like rain and Monday and me, standing out here the closest lunch to their lazy doorways where they just rode the elevator and previously sat on their ass for four hours while I was out here, is just something that happens naturally.

The real foregone conclusion? The discussion they would have while they waited for me to assemble their lunches. Any moment now, two of my most regulars would pop out of those doors looking like rats that had escaped the maze by following the scent of my cart, though by now they had memorized the route and the smell did not matter. Walking up, always complaining about some boss with a woman's-sounding name. Eve, Edie, Eden, something E. Nothing better, nothing exciting, nothing entertaining. Just complaints and insults about the other people upstairs that they could laugh about. Nothing ever to leave a smile on my face. No good stories to share with my wife that night.

Overhearing hundreds of conversations every day, I listen close, so often surprised about how little they say, how little all these empty people say. Once in a great while someone might laugh again as innocently as my children, without worry or presumption or airs of superiority, but then I would quickly turn to see them speaking impersonally into a phone. They had no meaningful human contact for the entire day, as far as I noticed, and I, too, suffered here in the vacuous silence of their life experience and idiot routine.

At least the rain meant they would want to buy from me. I could stand the inane conversation for that long.

Chicken over rice punched through the doors of 120 West, walking like his lunch break would die if enough moisture met his flesh. The greasy little tufts of his hair would surely perish of he did not get back inside in 20 minutes. From somewhere behind my cart, gyro no tomatoes materialized separately and embraced his coworker's hand with a slap-gripping motion that effectively co-mingled all of their germs. I could not really complain; without a sink I found myself consuming an entire bottle of antibacterial hand lotion every day.

Neither one could legitimately worry about his clothes, however. A couple gallons of fine Manhattan acid rain would force six generations of wrinkles out of over-rice's plaid shirt, and just possibly, if New Jersey had stocked the sky with enough pollution, some of it might wear no-tomatoes' crisp too-blue jeans into a state more suited to his age. Even I could recognize the fashions of this morally decrepit culture.

I had one main theory about them, and used their lunches to eavesdrop-test my hypothesis. They either did not have girlfriends or they perpetually fought with them. Some extreme extent of fighting, so that work offered comforting solace away from them. Midday would be an inopportune time to break the vacation, so I never heard about these possible women. I believed that they had ignorantly-proudly found the buy-one-get-twelve women whose marketable skills amount to indifference, attitude, and tendency towards infidelity. They certainly had no wives, or serious prospects.

My wife, blessed woman, would never let the world see me like it sees these men. In my prime, she had me dressed as sharply as the tailor could sew, as crisply starched and clean-collared as cotton could hold. She still did her best, though my prime had lingered and gathered itself at my middle and between the deepening wrinkles on my face and chin.

Tsk on these business vagrants and their poor choices in temporary mates. I felt sure that only sex could hold their relationships tenuously together, with no families, no marriage, no commitment of any sort to make them real and together. And here the miserable bachelors came.

They spoke to me, and I gave them a few falsely heavily accented syllables of confirmation. I turned my back just as gyro extracted an envelope from his coat pocket. The wrinkled thing came out with damp dimples all over it, where his hand had tightly gripped and the morning rain must have snuck in. Flagrant loops of writing adorned the abused paper, the ink smeared like it had been shaken hard an instant before drying. The entire postage stamp edge of the envelope was shorn, ragged.

An obviously careful, elegant woman had penned the letters I glimpsed before moving to ready a pita for the gyro. I imagined her ripe strawberry blonde hair falling over her ears as she leaned forward to write, her eyes a bit vacant and sad as they rolled over the telephone book addresses for the one she needed. She dated the upper right corner writing out the full date, no dashes or slashes, the act of a sincere woman expressing unhurried and important words. Soft sparse fields of freckles cushioned the smooth end of the pen as it pursed her cheek, contemplating between 'Dear' and whether she would use a pet name or his real one. The real one, she looped down two full lines below to get the letters roundly finished.

Sentences spread beneath her hand, each containing the memories and experiences that bound her to the addressee. Only he could share their full meaning, comprehend exactly how much thought went into each pen stroke. To him, the words would read as speech, the beautiful ink of her voice reminiscing, questioning, hoping for his response.

A letter from her could simply say 'how do you do' and still fill three sheets front and back. But the one I caught a snippet of was not a casual vehicle. Men did not wear how-do-you-do letters soft and supple in their pockets, and did not share them in an impending rainstorm like a crossword puzzle in desperate need of solving. I felt strongly that the words inside the envelope asked more questions than these men were capable of answering.

I dropped out of reverie and continued to fill the warmed, flat pita with freshly carved gyro meat and supplied it with an ample amount of white sauce, showing the hooky-playing businessman as I provided this final touch, then wrapping it doubly in aluminum foil. I piled a bed of white rice in a styrofoam box and started liberally selecting chunks of chicken from the back of the simmering pile. I added some salad to the front corner before snapping the tabbed lid closed.

These two were not complaining to each other as usual. I heard no dissent in their voices and no office-talk, though they spoke in a hushed, secretive tone uncharacteristic of them, figuring out some mystery. Or woefully failing to. I fully believed the letter bore neither gyro no tomatoes' nor chicken over rice's address, and neither of them had a clue who she was. Or how vulnerable.