jacquel showed him how to strap it in securely , and shadow closed up the hearse while jacquel listened to the old man who had been married to lila goodchild , unmindful of the cold , an old man in his slippers and his bathrobe out on the wintry sidewalk telling jacquel how his children were vultures , no better than hovering vultures , waiting to take what little he and lila had scraped together , and how the two of them had fled to st. louis , to memphis , to miami , and how they wound up in cairo , and how relieved he was that lila had not died in a nursing home , how scared he was that he would .