peak flow at four, the action plan on the refrigerator with its green and
yellow and red zones, his own sleep deferred to some future he no longer
scheduled. Her pulmonologist wanted her seen on the twentieth, in the city,
at nine in the morning, and a nine o'clock anything an hour away meant
Adam had to arrive at it as a person and not as the shell a night shift leaves
26
behind. Denise, who owed him nothing and paid her debts anyway, took his
shift on the night of the nineteenth. "Sleep," she ordered him, in the hospital
corridor, with the authority of a woman who had watched him work a code
on no sleep in June. "Actual sleep. In a bed. I'll bring the swap form by in the
afternoon and you can sign it with your eyes open, as a novelty."
She came at four with the form and a bag of peaches from the stand on
Eleven, and Lily, who adored her, installed her at the kitchen table with a
glass of tea and the entire plot of a book about a horse. Adam signed the
form. He ate a peach standing at the sink. And then, because the house was
quiet and the couch was there and Lily was narrating at full strength one
room away, he did the thing he had been warned against by every
day-sleeper he knew: he sat down for one minute, in the armchair, with his
shoes still on.
He woke to the sound of a diesel changing its mind, and to Lily's voice at the
window going up the scale, and to Denise saying his name in the doorway in
the tone she used for falling oxygen numbers.
The tow truck was Wexford Towing, white, with the name in green down the
side, and it had Denise's sedan by the front wheels, already lifted, already
angled, when Adam got to the street in his bare feet. Kyle Wexford stood at
the controls with his hand on the lever, thirty-eight and built like a fence
post, with his aunt's eyes and none of her certainty worn openly. Bea stood
across the lane on her own grass with the notebook closed under her arm,
watching the way she watched everything, as if the street were a document
she was proofreading.
"That's my car," Denise said. She'd come out in her socks. "I am standing
right here. That is my car, and I am standing right here looking at it."
27
"Yes, ma'am," Kyle said, miserable and mechanical. "I have to take it in once
it's hooked. It's the policy."
"Kyle." Adam kept his voice at the tempo he used for rooms that were tilting.
"Put it down. She's a guest in my house. The car's in front of my house, on
the edge of my own yard, and the woman it belongs to is standing here
telling you her name."
Kyle didn't look at Bea. That was the detail Adam kept. He looked at the
lever, and at the truck, and at his own boots, anywhere but across the lane.
"Aunt Bea says it's an unregistered vehicle on a private street, Mr. Reyes," he
said. "She called it in as unregistered. I have to take it in once it's called."
"Kyle Wexford, I have known you since—" Denise began, and stopped,
because Bea had opened the notebook, unhurried, and begun to write, and the
small sound of the pen did what it always did.
Adam drove Denise to the tow yard in his own car with Lily in the back seat
holding the bag of peaches, because there was no one else to leave her with
and because some errands a child simply attends, and she would remember it
or she wouldn't. The yard sat out on Route 11 behind a chain-link fence with
a cinderblock office and a fan turning in the window. Kyle came in behind
them and went behind the counter and became a clerk, which was easier for
both of them. The invoice was already written. Adam read it twice. TOW —
UNREGISTERED VEHICLE, PRIVATE STREET: $185. GATE FEE
(AFTER HOURS): $60. TOTAL DUE: $245. Cash, the sign on the wall said,
for releases after five.
"Two hundred and forty-five dollars," Adam said, "to drive a car four miles
and open a gate you're standing next to."
"Gate fee's the gate fee, Mr. Reyes," Kyle said. "I don't set it."
28
"No," Adam said. "You just collect it." He took the money from the bank
envelope in his glove box, the envelope that had been the brake pads and
Lily's new spacer and the winter's filters all wearing one hat, and counted it
onto the counter, and he watched Kyle write PAID on the invoice in the same
hand as the notebook's, the family hand, upright as fence posts, and stamp it
with the date. Denise, beside him, said his name once, in the voice of a
person offering to carry half of something.
"It's not a bill, Denise," Adam said quietly, when they were back outside and
her car was down off the lift and whole again. "It's a receipt. There's a
difference, and the difference matters to me tonight."
She didn't argue. Nurses know the sound of a man filing something away in
the correct drawer of himself, and she only said, "Then keep it somewhere
safe," and drove home ahead of him through the dusk, and Adam followed
her taillights the whole four miles with the invoice on the passenger seat,