Crossing Off the List

Joyce Franklin is a retired school librarian who lives in the heart of Brooklyn. She often spends her days observing people including a younger dark-haired man who she calls the Staring Man, as he often seems to be observing everything and everyone around him. When the Staring Man's older friend, Yori Nakajima, asks Joyce to help him out she finally learns his name, Bucky. Some time later Bucky Barnes approaches her himself, needing help with achieving a list of goals he keeps in a small notebook. It's not the only list he carries but it takes some time and a lot of trust before he is willing to share his second list with her. As their friendship grows, Joyce and Bucky support each other through all the different challenges of modern life, even when outside events interfere with that.

This is a story of friendship between an older woman wanting to hang on to life and an old soul in a younger man's body wanting to understand and experience what he has missed since his life changed, after he fell into a mountain chasm in 1945.

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