"Well," Doris said, locking up, looking at the boarded window, at the boy's father, who had arrived in slippers and a parka and shaken Darius's hand four separate times, at the ordinary wreckage of an ordinary mistake. "Very boring."
"Boring is underrated," Darius said.
The new window went in within two days, which the glazier presented as a Christmas miracle and charged for accordingly. The boy came back in January with an envelope of car-wash money that Darius declined, and then, when the boy stood there stricken with the envelope still out, accepted twenty dollars of it toward the legal aid jar by the register. The framed shard stayed where it was. Doris proposed, once, adding a second shard beside it, and a plaque reading ASK BEFORE YOU ASSUME, PART TWO, and was refused, and mentioned the idea twice a year thereafter purely to watch him refuse it again.
The funeral was in the spring.
An old colleague died of the ordinary treachery of a heart, and the service was held in a chapel across town with too many flowers and exactly the right number of stories. Darius wore the charcoal suit. He stood in the receiving line and said the things that are said, which are insufficient and are also, somehow, the correct things. Afterward he drove not home but to the station, and he stood for a while in the lot beneath the camera.
It was late afternoon. The sun was going down along Harrison Boulevard, and the replacement glass, the second replacement, if anyone was counting, and Doris was, took the light the way still water takes it, all at once and without comment.
A car pulled in. Not for fuel. It parked by the door, and a woman got out, late twenties, with a folder under her arm and the expression of a person who has rehearsed a question in the car and is determined to get it out before her nerve changes its mind.
"Excuse me," she said. "Are you the owner?"
"I am."
"I just moved in. Over on Maple Court. The HOA sent me a fence notice." She held up the folder slightly, not offering it, just establishing that it existed and had weight. "My fence. It's been there since before I bought the house, and now there's a notice, and a fine schedule, and a deadline, and I've read the covenants three times and I cannot find the rule they're citing. I might just be missing it. I probably am missing it. But I thought, people said you would know. Do you know a good property attorney?"
Darius did not take the folder. He pointed instead, through his own front window, to the corkboard just inside the door, where the legal aid fund's information had been posted since the first jar filled: a card, a phone number, the name of a clinic that took exactly this kind of call, and a list of the two attorneys in the county who would read a fence notice for a flat fee and tell a person, in plain language, whether the paper in her hand was law or weather.
"Start there," he said. "Before you pay anybody anything, before you answer the notice, before the deadline does your thinking for you. Read your covenants against the notice, line by line, and make them show you the rule. If the rule isn't there, the notice is a suggestion."
"And if it is there?"
"Then you'll know that too, and knowing is most of it. But get the advice first. Because sometimes people need help before the brick gets thrown."
She looked at him then, a little puzzled, as people sometimes did when a sentence arrived with more behind it than the sentence itself. "The brick?"
"Ask Doris," he said, "when you go in for coffee. She tells it in four minutes. She hates telling it, which makes her very good at it."
The woman laughed, surprised, and went in, and through the glass Darius watched her buy a coffee she had not come in for and read a corkboard like it was a bus schedule out of a difficult town. The light went down another degree. The chargers hummed. A truck he did not know took the corner wide and slow, the way everyone took it now in his memory, whether they did or not.
People asked him, across the years, what he remembered most about it, and they expected the answer to be the convoy, or the credentials, or the look on a powerful woman's face in the moment the ground revised itself beneath her. That was the part of the story that got told at dinners. That was the part where the world, briefly and against its habits, rhymed.