riding there like a passenger he intended to keep.
The appointment the next morning took twenty minutes and went as well as
those appointments go: the pulmonologist kept the plan as it was, praised the
log Adam kept of Lily's numbers, and never knew that the man presenting it
had slept three hours and paid two hundred forty-five dollars for the privilege
of the sleep. First, the breathing. The plan held. Everything else got
numbered after that, and the invoice, for a while, went unnumbered, into the
junk drawer, under the takeout menus and the dead batteries, where a man
puts the things he is not yet ready to have a policy about.
August came in and the lane began to change in small change, the way a
fever changes a patient by degrees too small to chart until you look back at
the whole sheet.
29
The chain came first. All spring and summer it had been a plain chain with a
hook, a suggestion in steel, and Adam had unhooked it himself more
Saturdays than he could count, coming home off shift, and hooked it back,
because the point had never been the chain. On the first Saturday of August
he came home at seven in the morning with his lunch bag on his shoulder
and found the chain up and a brass padlock on it, new, the metal still bright,
the keyhole oiled. He stood looking at it with the sun coming up through the
farmhouse's maples. He had bolt cutters in his garage. He had a bad back and
a sleeping daughter waiting at Felix's, where she went on the mornings he
worked, and he had the whole day to decide what kind of man the lane was
going to make him argue about being, and in the end he parked his car on the
shoulder of Route 11, outside the mouth of the lane, and walked in past the
farmhouse with his bag, like a delivery, like a guest.
Bea was at her mailbox. She wished him good morning with great cordiality.
"There's a lock on the chain, Mrs. Wexford," Adam said.
"There is," she said. "After the towing incident, I felt the lane needed to take
its security seriously. Strangers' vehicles, people walking in off the highway.
Anyone on the lane who needs the combination will be given it, of course.
The residents who are current in their arrangements" — she said it the way a
nurse says a patient's numbers, as a category, not an accusation — "have it
already."
"I see," Adam said, because the other sentences he had were not ones he was
willing to say in front of his daughter's summer morning, and Felix's door
was opening, and Lily was coming down the old man's steps with her
backpack and her whole face lit at the sight of him. He took her hand. Her
breathing was easy and clear, and he did the arithmetic he always did and put
the padlock in its column, after that, unnumbered.
30
The truck came second. Bea owned a green pickup of great age and greater
presence, Ernest's truck, which she drove twice a week to the grocery and the
feed store and parked the rest of the time nose-out in her drive like a flag. In
the second week of August she took to parking it across the turnaround at the
lane's end in the afternoons, athwart the circle, so that the turnaround was a
word and not a thing. Adam discovered the new arrangement through the
delivery van: a young driver with a compressor on his hand truck — the
replacement part for Lily's nebulizer, ordered in July, insured, expected —
standing at Adam's door saying the words no medical household ever wants
to hear, which were that he'd have to come back.
The van was nosed into the lane as far as Adam's house and could go no
farther, and its driver, who was nineteen and apologizing to everyone in
advance, had to reverse the whole length of Wexford Lane to Route 11 with
the compressor still aboard, because the circle where fourteen houses turned
around was occupied by one green truck. Adam walked backward the full
length of the lane ahead of the van with both hands up, guiding it, a nurse
doing traffic duty in his own street in the white August light, calling out the
mailboxes and the culvert edge, while up at the head of the lane Bea watered
her porch plants with the hose and watched, or did not watch; he never once
caught her looking, which he understood was its own kind of looking. The
driver got out clean. The compressor came three days later by a different
truck, at an hour when the turnaround stood empty, and Adam never learned
whether that was schedule or mercy.
The collection box came third, and it was the smallest of the three, and it was
the one that stayed with him. Lily's school ran a supply drive every August,
notebooks and pencils for the kids whose lists outran their houses, and this
year Lily — who knew the inside of that arithmetic from the other side of it
31
— had appointed herself the lane's whole committee. She made a poster in
marker on a sheet of poster board from the dollar store: SCHOOL
SUPPLIES FOR KIDS, in letters that leaned with enthusiasm, and THANK
YOU! underneath with the O of YOU drawn as a sun. Adam helped her
staple it to a cardboard box, and they set the box at the mouth of the lane by