I also knew the letter was asking me to do something I could not simply do and be done with. Removing a tank is not like removing a lawn chair. It involves lines, valves, permits, and other people's mornings. The letter treated it like furniture left in the wrong room. I stood in the drive and looked back at the kitchen window where it sat under my mug, and I thought about how much easier everything would be if the letter were right about what it described. It was not, and I would have to prove that without making a scene about it.
Chapter 2
My name is Nolan Avery. I was forty-one years old, and I lived at the low end of Cedar Hollow on four and a half acres that did not quite belong to the rest of the neighborhood and did not quite belong anywhere else either.
Cedar Hollow itself was sixty houses on three curving streets, with identical mailbox posts marching along the curbs like a committee had approved them one afternoon and then never thought about them again. The houses were newer than mine, most of them, and they had the comfortable, settled look of places where the lawns were mowed on a schedule and the paint was still deciding whether it wanted to be beige or gray. Mine was smaller and older, with cedar siding that had weathered to silver. The porch leaned slightly, despite the fact that I had rebuilt it myself, which told you everything you needed to know about the ground it stood on and my relationship with it. I had rebuilt it straight. The ground had other ideas.
Behind the house stood a metal workshop, and behind that, a gravel drive that never quite dried out in spring. In the mornings I made coffee, forgot about it while I checked the day's jobs, and drank it cold standing in the workshop doorway. In the evenings I came back inside with grease worked so deeply into my knuckles that soap had stopped pretending it could remove it. I scrubbed, I rinsed, and the lines of my hands stayed dark. It was not dirt, exactly. It was a record.
I liked the low end of the neighborhood. It was quieter down there, where the streets curved away and the lots opened up a little. Water ran downhill, which meant my ground stayed damp longer than anyone else's, but it also meant I could hear birds in the morning before the rest of Cedar Hollow woke up and started its lawnmowers. My neighbors were not far away. They were just far enough that I could get a full cup of cold coffee into me before anyone needed anything from me.
The house suited me. It was not large, and it did not try to be. The rooms were plain, the windows were old, and the heating system was one I understood down to the last valve, because I had serviced it myself more times than I could count. When something rattled, I knew where to look. When something went quiet that should not have gone quiet, I knew that too. There is a particular comfort in living inside a system you can fix. Most people live inside systems they have to call someone about. I was usually the someone they called.
That was the shape of my life before the letter: work in the workshop, jobs out on the road, coffee gone cold, hands that never quite came clean. It was not a dramatic life. I preferred it that way. Drama tends to arrive with paperwork, and paperwork, as I was about to learn, tends to arrive in burgundy folders.
My truck was old enough that I knew its moods. It started on the second try on cold mornings and on the first try when it felt like cooperating, which was most of the time. The bed carried a toolbox, a set of gauges, spare regulators, and a coil of line I had been meaning to organize for about a year. Organization, in my workshop, was a theory rather than a practice. I knew where everything was, which is a different thing from it being tidy, and anyone who borrowed a tool from me learned quickly to put it back exactly where they found it or to endure a long, patient silence.
The workshop itself was a metal building with a concrete floor that stayed cool even in summer. I had a bench along one wall, shelves of parts I had labeled in my own handwriting, and a wall calendar that was usually two months behind, because turning the page was a job I always meant to do after the next job. Light came in through high windows and fell in rectangles across the floor. In winter, I kept a small heater going out there, not because I minded the cold, but because cold fingers make clumsy work, and clumsy work around propane is not a joke I was willing to tell. I liked the place. It smelled like oil and metal and old wood, and when the door was shut, the rest of Cedar Hollow could go on being Cedar Hollow without me, for an hour or two at least.