And some nights, lying awake in the dark that had been his whole world for six years, he wondered if the house he and June had built a life in had already stopped being fully his. He would lie there listening to the house settle — the refrigerator's hum, the ticking of the clock June had wound every Sunday, the wind moving through the maple out front — and he would think about the rooms he could still walk without a misstep, and about how strange it was that a man could know every inch of a house and still feel like a guest in it. He would touch the edge of the blanket June had mended, and he would think about the photograph on the mantel, and about whether it had been moved again that day, and about how much of his life was now held in other people's hands. He did not yet have a name for what was happening to him. He only knew that the darkness had stopped being just the absence of sight, and had become something else: a quiet room, with the door closed, and someone else holding the key.
Paula Krueger had come recommended by a neighbor, no formal agency involved, only a woman with some home health experience looking for steady work. Delia Brooks, who lived down Larkspur Road and had known June for years, had mentioned her one afternoon over the fence: a woman named Paula, kind, experienced, looking for a steady position, someone who could help Silas with the daily tasks and keep an eye on the house. Karen, calling from Chattanooga, had agreed that it sounded sensible. Silas, sitting on his porch with Clara announcing the hour, had agreed too. It seemed, at the time, like the simplest answer to a practical problem.
Silas liked her well enough in the beginning. She was cheerful and attentive, quick to handle the small daily tasks blindness made difficult — the laundry folded and put away, the meals cooked and set out, the mail brought in and stacked on the kitchen table where Silas could find it. She talked while she worked, filling the house with a bright, easy chatter that, after the long quiet following June's death, felt almost like company. She complimented the house, the garden, the way Silas kept himself, and she laughed at his dry remarks in a way that made him feel, for a little while, less alone in rooms that had gone quiet. Delia Brooks had mentioned her over the fence one afternoon, in the easy way neighbors mention a solution to a problem they have been worrying about on your behalf. "There's a woman, Paula," Delia had said, "kind, experienced, looking for steady work," and she had spoken of Paula's home health experience and her cheerful manner, and Silas, listening to the fence post creak under Delia's hand, had thought it sounded like the answer to a question he had been avoiding. Karen had called that Sunday and agreed, and the following Monday Paula had arrived with a bag of groceries and a smile, and had set about the house as if she had always belonged in it. In the first weeks she was everything Silas had hoped for: the laundry folded and put away before he thought to ask, meals set out at regular hours, the house kept clean without fuss, the mail stacked neatly on the kitchen table where he could find it by touch. She talked while she worked, and the talk filled rooms that had gone quiet since June, and Silas found himself looking forward to the mornings, to the sound of another person moving through the house, to the feeling that the days had a shape again. He told Karen, on a Sunday call that still lasted as long as they wanted, that the help was working out, and Karen had sounded relieved, and Silas had been relieved too, because needing help and finding it are two different kinds of luck, and he knew it.
The bank visit came on a Tuesday, months later, on a morning when the light through the kitchen window was warm on the left side of Silas's face. Paula had brought it up the day before, gently, while she was setting out lunch: the bills, the statements he could not read, the convenience of having someone on the account who could pay them on time. She had made it sound small, and Silas, who did not like being a burden and did not like the idea of bills piling up where he could not see them, had agreed after a day's thought. At the bank, Paula guided his elbow to the counter and told him where to sign, and the pen felt heavy in his hand, and the paper felt too smooth, and the clerk's voice was polite and distant, and Paula's voice was close and warm, explaining that this was only so the bills could be paid. He signed, and he told himself it was what people did when they got old: they trusted someone, and they hoped. In the weeks after, the summaries Paula gave him grew shorter. The numbers, when she read them at all, no longer matched the shape of his spending. A withdrawal here for groceries that seemed too large, a payment there for a pharmacy bill he did not remember, a sum that vanished between one summary and the next. Each time he asked, Paula had an answer ready — a laugh, a reassurance, a reminder that he was misremembering — and each time he believed her, because doubting her meant doubting the only person who came to his house every day, and because the alternative was a loneliness he did not want to face.