"I don't think less of you, Felix," he said, which was true.
"I know it," Felix said. "That's how I can afford to tell you."
The call to town hall took four days to make, not because Adam didn't know
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the number but because he knew himself, and knew that a call made in heat
becomes a complaint, and a complaint becomes a feud, and a feud was a
country he had no intention of emigrating to with a nine-year-old. He made it
instead on a plain Wednesday morning, from the kitchen, with Lily at school
and the house quiet, on hold through two transfers and a stretch of music,
until a woman's voice came on the line with the particular steadiness of a
person who has answered the same telephone for thirty years.
"Town clerk's office. This is Peg Sullivan."
"Mrs. Sullivan, my name is Adam Reyes. I live on Wexford Lane. I'm calling
with a question I should probably know the answer to, and I don't." He had
rehearsed it while the music played, and he kept it to the shape he'd
rehearsed. "Is Wexford Lane a town street? Who owns it — who is
responsible for it, legally? I've been told it's private, and I've been paying my
taxes long enough to wonder whether the town agrees."
There was a pause on the line that he would think about for days afterward. It
was not the pause of a woman looking something up. It had a shape he
recognized from work, from standing in doorways with results in his hand: it
was the pause of a person deciding how much of what she knows is hers to
say into a telephone.
She did not say the street was private. He noticed that first, and noticed
himself noticing it, the way you notice a missing step only by the drop. She
did not say it was the town's, either. What she said was: "The Wexford file is
in the old cabinet, Mr. Reyes. The paper one, from when the subdivision
went in. Nobody's asked me to open it in — well. Some time." A keyboard
clicked, once, and stopped. "I'll pull the file, Mr. Reyes. Give me a few days
with it. Files that old, a person wants to read them properly before she starts
telling a man what's in them."
35
"Thank you," Adam said. "That's more than I expected, if I'm honest."
"Is it," Peg Sullivan said, not quite a question, and there was something in
her tone then, dry and unhurried, that he would turn over all evening — the
tone of a woman who had been waiting years for a particular question to be
asked by somebody with a reason to ask it, and intended now to enjoy
answering it at the speed it deserved. "You call me Monday, Mr. Reyes. Or
I'll call you. Either way."
That night, after Lily was asleep with her breathing running smooth and even
through the monitor's small green light, Adam opened the junk drawer in the
kitchen and took out the tow invoice from under the menus and the dead
batteries. He read it once more, all of it: the charges, the family handwriting,
the stamped date. Then he got down the blue folder from the top of the
refrigerator — the folder with Lily's asthma action plan, her medication list,
the pulmonologist's card, the school nurse's forms, everything in his life that
had to be findable in the dark at three in the morning — and he slid the
invoice in at the back of it, behind the plan, where the paper in this house
was kept that could not be allowed to be lost.
First the breathing. Then the paper.
The school bus problem arrived the second week of September, wearing the
disguise of a schedule change.
Adam found the notice in Lily's backpack on a Wednesday, folded into
quarters under a spelling list and a permission slip for the county fair field
trip. Goshen Falls Public Schools, Transportation Office. Due to access
difficulties at the Wexford Lane turnaround, the letter said, Bus 14's stop for
Wexford Lane riders would be relocated, effective Monday, to the shoulder
36
of Route 11 at the lane's mouth. Parents were thanked for their
understanding. A map was attached, hand-drawn by somebody in an office
who had never stood where the map said to stand.
He read it twice at the kitchen counter while the pasta water came up to a
boil. Access difficulties. He had lived on Wexford Lane for six years and he
could have written the letter plainer in four words: Bea's truck. Bea's chain.
The cul-de-sac at the head of the lane was the only place a bus could turn. It
had been built for turning — a wide bulb of asphalt in front of the farmhouse,
drawn that way on every map the county owned. Bea parked her old Ford
across its throat most days now, not quite blocking it, the way a cat sleeps in
a doorway, and on the days she remembered, the chain was up across the
lane's mouth besides, padlocked, with the little enameled sign she had
ordered from a catalog: WEXFORD LANE — PRIVATE — RESIDENTS
AND GUESTS ONLY. A bus could not turn in a space occupied by a pickup
and an argument. A bus could not pass a chain at all. Sam Dolan, who drove
Bus 14 and had the patience of a man who had hauled other people's children
for nineteen years, had tried twice — backing down the lane the second time,