Frank, hearing this for the hundredth time from his porch chair, would always snort and say, "You're going to make me sound like a hero."
"You are a hero," Daniel would say.
"I'm a retired lineman with a bad knee."
"You're both."
And they'd drink their coffee, and the street would wake up around them, and the lines β all the lines, the ones you can see and the ones you can't β would hold.
The End
Part Five: The Next Splice
26
The Hendersons moved out in September.
Nobody had expected it β they'd been on Sycamore Lane for twenty-two years, longer than almost anyone except Frank. But their daughter had twins in Colorado, and the Hendersons decided, as Mrs. Henderson put it, "that we'd rather be tired grandparents than rested strangers." The whole street helped them pack. The dog β Biscuit, twelve years old and deaf in one ear β supervised from the driveway, exactly as he had supervised everything on Sycamore Lane for over a decade.
Daniel stood on his porch with Frank, watching the moving truck pull away.
"End of an era," Frank said.
"Start of a new one," Daniel said. "Somebody's going to buy that house."
"Somebody young, probably. Somebody with no idea what they're walking into."
Daniel smiled. "Like me, twenty years ago?"
"Exactly like you. Poor souls."
The house sold in six weeks β fast for the neighborhood β to a young couple: Priya Nair, twenty-nine, a software engineer who worked remotely, and her husband, Tomas, a paramedic who worked nights and slept days. They had a baby on the way, a dog named Pepper who was Biscuit's spiritual successor, and absolutely no knowledge of the street's history.
Daniel learned this on their first Saturday, when Priya knocked on his door holding a laptop and wearing the particular expression of a remote worker whose internet has died.
"Hi β sorry β I'm Priya, we just moved in two doors down, and my internet is completely out, and I have a deploy in forty minutes, and the ISP says they can't send anyone until Thursday β"
"Come in," Daniel said.
He got her set up on his guest network in five minutes. She nearly cried with relief.
"You're a lifesaver. Seriously. Tomas is asleep β night shift β and I was about to have a full meltdown."
"It happens," Daniel said. "What does your setup look like? Router lights?"
"Red. All red. And there's β I don't know, there's some kind of box on the side of the house, and one of the cables looks chewed?"
Daniel felt a strange prickle at the back of his neck. "Chewed."
"Yeah, like β animal teeth? Is that a thing?"
"It's a thing," Daniel said. "Squirrels love cable insulation. Come on, I'll take a look."
He grabbed his toolbox β the same toolbox he'd carried that first Tuesday morning, years ago, when he'd gone out to look at his own dead lines β and walked down to the Hendersons' old house with Priya. Frank was already on his porch, watching.
"Trouble?" Frank called.
"Squirrels," Daniel said.
Frank's eyebrows went up. He got out of his chair β slower than he used to, but he still got up β and followed them.
The junction box on the side of the house told the whole story: two cables gnawed clean through, copper glinting, little tooth marks in the insulation. Classic squirrel work.
"Well," Frank said, peering at the damage with the eye of a man who'd spent forty years reading poles like other people read newspapers, "you've got varmints."
"Can it be fixed?" Priya asked.
"Temporarily, yes. Permanently, you need the ISP to replace the run and put in armored conduit." Frank looked at Daniel. "We've got spare cable in your garage, don't we?"
"We do," Daniel said. "Funny how that keeps happening."
They spliced in a temporary fix in twenty minutes β Frank talking Priya through it the way he'd once talked Daniel through his own education, pointing out the color codes, showing her how the weather-sealing worked. Priya watched with the focused attention of an engineer learning a new system.
"You're good at this," she said to Frank.
"Forty years a lineman," Frank said. "It's the only thing I'm good at. Ask anybody."
"That's not true," Daniel said automatically, and Frank snorted, and Priya looked between them with the expression of someone sensing a story.
"There's a story here, isn't there," she said.
"Oh, there's a story," Frank said.
"Tell me over coffee sometime," Priya said. "Tomas too. We want to know the street."
"You'll hear it," Daniel promised. "Everybody hears it eventually. Usually from Frank, usually at length."
"I tell it efficiently," Frank protested.
"You told it for forty-five minutes at the block party."
"There was a lot of story."