the mailboxes, where everyone who belonged on Wexford Lane passed it
twice a day, and for two days it collected: a pack of pencils, three notebooks,
a ruler, a box of crayons with the paper worn soft, put there by hands Adam
could mostly name.
On the third morning the box was gone. Not emptied. Gone, box and poster
and pencils and all, as if it had been unhappened. A note was in Adam's
mailbox instead, placed, not mailed, in the upright hand: UNPERMITTED
STRUCTURE AT LANE MOUTH. REMOVED. PER LANE STANDARD
4.
Adam found the poster that evening in the ditch grass by Route 11 where the
county mower would take it, damp through, the sun of THANK YOU
bleeding its colors into the paper. He carried it home flat on both hands like a
tray and dried it on the kitchen counter under a dish towel, and when Lily
asked where the box had gone, he told her the truth in the size it fit her: that
Mrs. Wexford had decided it broke a rule, and had taken it away without
asking, and that the pencils had gone with it. Lily was quiet a long time,
doing the arithmetic children do, in which the fairness is always the first
column.
"She took the pencils for the kids who don't have pencils," she said at last,
"because of a rule about a box."
"That's about the size of it," Adam said.
32
"Then the rule is wrong," Lily said, with the clean certainty of a person who
had not yet learned to charge herself for her conclusions, and went to make a
new poster, because she was her father's daughter and the drive ran through
Friday. They put the second box on their own porch, where even Bea's
notebook had not yet claimed jurisdiction, and it collected less, being farther
from the road, and more, in a way Adam didn't try to explain to her, because
every single thing in it had been carried up a walk on purpose.
It was Felix who gave the season its history, on an evening late in the month,
when Adam walked Lily down to return a borrowed fan and stayed, as he
always stayed, for the glass of tea that Felix poured whether you wanted it or
not. Felix Abernathy at eighty-one kept his porch the way he kept his
accounts with the world: swept, shaded, everything in reach. His house was
the second on the lane, and he had lived on Wexford Lane since there were
three houses and a gravel track and Ernest Wexford sold lots off the farm one
at a time with a handshake and a survey.
"Ernest kept this lane like a garden," Felix said, when Adam, not quite idly,
mentioned the padlock. "That's the thing nobody remembers right. He'd be
out there in March filling the washouts with a wheelbarrow, one load at a
time, humming. He knew every culvert on this road like they were his own
teeth. A man kept a thing that way because it was his and because everybody
on it was his too, in his mind. Like tenants in a house he was proud of."
"And Bea?" Adam said.
"Bea keeps it like a border crossing," Felix said, without malice, almost with
admiration, the way you'd describe weather you'd learned to dress for. "Same
pair of hands' worth of work, son. Different religion. Ernest's lane you lived
on. Bea's lane you are admitted to, daily, on terms." He turned his glass in its
ring of water. "Ernest did all the paper with the town, back when the houses
33
went up. Every form, every filing. Bea never touched a paper in her life if
she could help it — Ernest used to say she was allergic to forms worse than
your Lily is to August. He used to say paper outlives everybody, so a man
had to be careful where he set it down. I never knew what he meant by it,
exactly. He just liked saying it, I think."
Adam filed that away in the drawer of himself where unnumbered things
were piling up, and might have let it lie there, except that Felix, refilling his
glass, arrived at the thing he'd plainly been carrying all evening.
"I pay it," Felix said. "The dues. Twenty dollars a month, since Ernest
passed. I want you to hear it from me and not from her book, if it ever comes
up." He held up one finger, an old man preempting a chart. "Not because I
think she's owed it. Because it's cheaper than her weather, Adam. I'm
eighty-one. I have a fixed income and a finite supply of mornings, and
twenty dollars buys me out of a war I don't have the years to win. You have
the years. That's the only difference between you and me, and it's not a
difference of character, whatever she writes in that book."
Adam thought about the red flag, the padlock, the green truck athwart the
circle, the poster bleeding in the ditch, and the invoice in his junk drawer
under the takeout menus. He thought about Denise's sedan riding up the lane
on the back of a white truck in its own socks, so to speak, and about Lily's
voice at the window. He thought about the phrase current in their
arrangements, and about how much of his life since February had been spent
being billed, in one currency or another, for the right to be let alone.