mirrors folded, a quarter mile in reverse between the mailboxes — and then
he had gone back to the transportation office and told them, in Adam's later
hearing of it, that he was not going to be the man who backed a school bus
over somebody's grandmother or somebody's kid, and the office had agreed
with him in the form of a letter folded into quarters.
Monday morning Adam walked Lily out to Route 11 in the dark.
It was not far. That was what everyone would say, and it was true the way a
hospital corridor is not far when you are the one walking it well. From their
porch to the lane's mouth was three hundred yards of gravel and good
intentions. From the lane's mouth to the stop was the part nobody had
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measured: a strip of mowed grass and crushed stone along a two-lane
highway where the speed limit said forty-five and the traffic said sixty,
where the gravel trucks came down from the quarry at five past six with their
beds empty and their brakes loud, where there was no sidewalk, no shoulder
worth the name, nothing between his daughter's backpack and the white line
but his own body, which he arranged, the way he had seen parents do outside
the ER in winter, on the traffic side.
Lily was nine. She had her mother's dark hair and his own habit of
inventorying a situation before she entered it, and she stood in the grass with
her nebulizer case in her backpack — because the school nurse kept the
backup, and the backup to the backup traveled with her — and watched a
logging truck go past close enough to move her bangs.
"Dad," she said. "The bus comes at six forty. You don't have to stay the
whole time."
"I know," Adam said.
"You have a shift."
"I know that too."
She looked up the road toward town, where the sky was going the color of
old dishwater, and she did not argue further, because she was nine and
understood more about her father than he said out loud. The Kowalski twins
arrived with their grandmother, who had driven them the quarter mile in a
sedan because she was seventy-eight and had read the same letter and
reached her own conclusions, and the three children stood in a row in the
grass like passengers on the platform of a station the railroad had forgotten,
and Adam stood behind them feeling the trucks go through his ribs.
He worked three twelves that week and walked her out four mornings, and
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on the fifth morning — Friday, his day off, a day built for sleeping — he
stood at the stop long after the bus had taken her, watching the traffic carve
the air where she had been standing, and then he went home and showered
and put on the good shirt he wore to parent-teacher conferences and drove
into Goshen Falls to file a complaint.
He had complained before, in the way you complain about weather — at the
fence line, on the phone, in the clerk's office doorway with his hat literally in
his hand the first summer, back when he still believed Bea Wexford was a
problem that politeness had simply failed to reach yet. This time he did it on
paper.
Peg Sullivan received the form the way she received everything in that
office, with both hands and no expression at all. She was sixty-three and had
been clerk of Goshen Falls since before the county's computers, and she read
his complaint standing up, all the way to the bottom, where he had written, in
the block for requested remedy, in his careful nurse's printing: Removal of
chain and obstruction from town lane. Restoration of school bus turnaround.
He had attached dates. He had attached the transportation letter. He had
attached a copy of the towing invoice from July — two hundred and
forty-five dollars, paid by his colleague from the ER, whose only offense had
been parking where Bea did not want a car on the Fourth of July — and he
had attached, because Peg had once mentioned it in passing and he had not
forgotten, a one-page list of everything since spring: the dues refused, the
sign, the chain, the cars ordered moved, the truck at the turnaround.
"You kept the invoice," Peg said.
"Somebody should keep the paper in this town."
She looked at him over the form for a moment, and something moved in her
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face that was not quite pity and not quite respect, though it had relations in
both families. "You're the fifteenth," she said.
"Fifteenth what?"
"Fifteenth formal complaint about Beatrice Wexford and that lane since
twenty sixteen." She set his form down precisely, squaring it with the edge of
the counter, the way she squared everything, as if paper behaved better in
formation. "Fourteen before you. I can tell you how every one of them
ended, because they all ended the same." She turned the top sheet of his
complaint over, though there was nothing on the back. "Resident advised."
"Advised to do what?"
"To keep the peace, mostly. To work it out neighborly. To park somewhere
else, or pay the twenty dollars, or not have guests." She slid his complaint
into a tray — not a drawer, Adam noticed, not a file. A tray, on the counter,
in the open. "You wrote yours down different," she said. "You attached
things."
"Does that matter?"
Peg Sullivan looked at the tray, and then at the door, and then — a woman