Chapter 41
After that, the workshop settled back into what it had always been, which was the best thing that could have happened to it.
Mornings started the same way they always had. I made coffee, carried the mug out to the workshop, set it on the bench, and forgot about it until it was cold. I answered calls, checked regulators, replaced a furnace filter that had not been changed since anyone could remember, and drove out to houses outside Cedar Hollow where nobody cared what my tank looked like as long as their heat came on. The work was ordinary. That was the point. For months, ordinary work had been interrupted by letters, hearings, and conversations at mailboxes. Now the interruptions stopped, and the ordinary work filled the space they left behind, the way water fills a trench once you stop digging in it.
Grease worked its way back into my knuckles, deep enough that soap stopped pretending it could remove it. I did not mind. It was an honest kind of dirt, the kind that came from fixing things rather than arguing about them. I kept a rag in my back pocket and a second one on the bench, and both of them turned the same dark color by the end of the week.
The map stayed on the wall.
I had thought, more than once, about taking it down and filing it away with the rest of the hearing exhibits. Alice Moreno's binder had gone back to her office, and the certified copy of the agreement had gone back into its folder. But the map was different. It was not a legal exhibit anymore. It was a working drawing: fourteen houses on the low loop, the line from the regulator station, the feed to the community hall generator, all marked in my own hand. I left it pinned above the bench because it was still true, and because it was still useful. When a call came in from one of the low-loop houses, I could look up and see exactly where that house sat on the line, and what else sat downstream of it.
One afternoon Ruth Henderson called about a pilot light, and I glanced at the map while I wrote down her address, even though I knew it by heart. It was a habit by then. The map, the cold coffee, the grease: they were the furniture of the workshop, and the workshop was the furniture of my life. I had spent a winter defending it. Now I got to simply work in it again, and that felt less like a victory than like a room going quiet after a long noise had stopped.
One call that week took me to a house outside the subdivision, where an old furnace had decided to retire without giving notice. I spent three hours coaxing it back, replacing a cracked igniter and cleaning a burner that looked as if it had not been cleaned since the house was built, and by the time I left, the owner, a woman in her seventies with a dog that supervised everything, had pressed a plate of biscuits into my hands and told me to come back before winter, not after. I ate one biscuit in the truck and saved the rest for the bench, where they sat beside the cold coffee until evening, when I remembered them and ate another.
Back in the workshop, the phone rang less than it had during the hearing months, and that, too, felt like a return to normal. The calls that did come were the right kind: a regulator, a pilot light, a water heater that had started making a noise like a kettle with opinions. I wrote them down in the logbook in pencil, the way I always had, and I did not write any letters to boards or lawyers. Alice Moreno called once, just to check that the rescission had arrived in writing and that no new letter had followed it. It had, and none had, and she said, "Good. File it and forget the file," which was excellent advice from a woman who made her living from files.
In the evenings I swept the workshop floor, which I had neglected during the busiest weeks, and I found, under the bench, a washer I had lost in the spring and a pencil stub I had used to mark the map. I kept the washer and threw the pencil away, and I thought about how a place settles when you stop defending it and start simply using it again. The workshop had never been a courtroom. It had always been a room with tools in it, and tools, unlike arguments, do not need an audience. They need a hand, and a problem, and a little patience, and I had all three in reasonable supply.