"I've had that tank for nine years," I said.
Chapter 5
For two weeks after that Tuesday, nothing much happened, which was its own kind of happening.
I went to work. I came home. I drank cold coffee in the workshop doorway and looked at the day's list, which was written in pencil on a clipboard that had seen better decades. A furnace outside town needed a regulator. A water heater needed a thermocouple. A farmhouse on the county road needed someone to look at a line that had started hissing in a way its owner did not like. I did those jobs, I wrote up the invoices, and I drove home along roads that were quiet in the late afternoon.
Cedar Hollow went on around me in its usual way. Lawns were mowed. Mailboxes were opened and closed. Someone put out a bin a day early and someone else, presumably, had feelings about it. I waved at neighbors when I saw them. Most of them waved back. A few of them looked at me a fraction of a second longer than usual, as if they were trying to remember whether there was something they were supposed to say to me. I did not ask them what it was.
In the evenings I worked in the workshop, putting tools back where they belonged and making notes about parts I needed to order. The tank sat behind the arborvitae, doing what it had always done, which was nothing visible at all. It did not hum loudly. It did not leak. It did not draw attention to itself except by being large and white and not a shrub. I checked it the way I always checked it, walked the line with my eyes, and went inside.
I said nothing to anyone about Celeste's visit. That was a decision, not an oversight. I had answered her questions on my own gravel, and I did not see the point in turning the conversation into a neighborhood topic before it needed to be one. Some disputes get smaller if you leave them alone for a fortnight. Others get larger. I did not yet know which kind this was, and I was in no hurry to find out by talking about it at the mailboxes.
Then, near the end of those two weeks, the first fine notice arrived. It was not the letter I would later fold on my kitchen table, not exactly, or rather it was the beginning of the paper trail that would lead to that letter. It stated a daily fine and a demand, in the same clean, final language Celeste had used on my drive, only now it was written down and therefore harder to pretend I had misheard. I read it, I set it aside, and I went back to work.
I still said nothing. Saying nothing is not the same as doing nothing, though people often confuse the two. I was watching, and waiting, and keeping my own counsel, which is a habit that has served me better than most of my other habits. The quiet days continued. The work continued. The fine, on paper at least, continued too.
One of those quiet days took me to a house twenty minutes out of town, where a water heater had decided to produce lukewarm water and nothing else. The owner, a man in his sixties with a dog that followed him from room to room, stood in the doorway of the utility closet and watched me work with the air of someone supervising a surgeon. I found the fault, replaced the part, and waited while the tank came back up to temperature. We talked about the weather, about the price of parts, about nothing in particular, and when I left, the dog followed me to the truck as if to confirm I had done the job properly. Those were the days I liked best: a clear problem, a clear fix, a drive home with the radio low.
Back in Cedar Hollow, the evenings grew a little longer and a little cooler, and I found myself checking the tank and the regulator more often than strictly necessary. Not because anything was wrong, but because attention is a form of preparation. I walked the line of the arborvitae, looked at the fittings, and listened for anything out of the ordinary. There was nothing out of the ordinary. The system ran the way it always ran, quietly and without ceremony, and I went inside, washed my hands twice, and ate dinner standing at the counter, which is where I ate dinner when I had been working late and did not see the point in sitting down properly.