spade through Bea's ornamental river rock, at the edge of her flower bed, and
found the second pin with two inches of soil over it and the cap still legible.
Trask stood up out of the flower bed with dirt on his knees, looked at the
chain across the lane's mouth, looked at his instrument, and said โ to his
assistant, to the morning, to no one who was supposed to be listening โ
"Matches. Matches to the inch. The lane the town took in seventy-nine is the
lane she's got chained, down to the pin by her mailbox."
He filed his report the following week. Adam got a copy because Peg
believed, by then, in copies.
What Adam did not get, not that week or the next, was a town that moved at
the speed of its own records.
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The council put the lane on its October agenda โ Item 9, Wexford Lane:
Status and Obstructions โ and Adam sat in the third row of the folding
chairs with his complaint file on his knees and his hands folded on top of it
like a man at a bedside he wasn't allowed to touch, and listened to the town
discuss his daughter's road in the grammar of procedure. There was genuine
feeling in the room; he would give them that later, to be fair, alone in his
truck. Two members had known Ernest. One had a grandchild on Bus 14.
But there was also the other grammar, the older one, the one that had closed
fourteen complaints: she was seventy-four, she was a widow, she had lived
there since before the town had a stoplight, and the county attorney โ
somebody ventured โ should really render an opinion, and the survey,
however thorough, should perhaps be reviewed, and the item was deferred, in
the end, for further study, by a vote of four to three, with the chair
apologizing to Adam from the dais in the tone of a man reading a weather
report for a county he didn't live in.
He was polite in public. He had been trained to it in rooms where politeness
was a clinical instrument, and he shook the chair's hand and thanked the
council for its time in the voice he used for families in the waiting room, the
voice that meant: I will not make this harder than it already is, for either of
us.
In private, in the truck, in the dark of the town hall lot, he sat with his
forehead against the top of the steering wheel and said some things to the
dashboard that he had not said since the winter his wife died, and then he
drove home and stood in the kitchen washing a sink of already-clean dishes
with a violence so controlled it was almost tenderness, and Lily, who was
supposed to be asleep, appeared in the doorway in her pajamas and watched
him for a while.
44
"You're doing the angry dishes," she said.
"I'm doing the careful dishes."
"They're the same dishes, Dad."
He set the last glass down gently โ deliberately, the way you set down
anything that matters โ and dried his hands, and came and sat at the table
across from his daughter, who had gotten out the checkers while he wasn't
looking, because in their house checkers were what you produced when a
thing had to be waited out.
"Four to three is close," Lily said, setting up her side. "Felix says four to
three means next time bring one more person."
"Felix says a lot of things."
"He says Bea isn't mad at us. He says she's mad at the year." She moved a
red checker forward with great decision. "I don't know what that means yet."
"Neither do I, baby," Adam said. "Play your side."
October brought the other machinery, the kind he knew by heart. Dr. Priya
Raman, who had managed Lily's lungs since Lily was four, turned the action
plan over on the exam room counter and revised it in her small, exact hand:
the controller dose up for the season, a burst of prednisone to be kept in the
kitchen cabinet and started on Adam's judgment without waiting for a
callback โ "You are the callback, Mr. Reyes, you and I both know it" โ the
flu shot in the left arm, the nebulizer solution checked and reordered, and the
school nurse's copy updated and signed in triplicate.
"October is our month," Dr. Raman said. "The viruses come back to school
before the children are ready for them. Crowds, cold air, excitement โ
Halloween is a holiday invented by people who never ran a peds ward." She
45
looked at him over the chart. "And the running to the bus stop at dawn, in the
cold, on the highway โ I read your addendum. I want it on the record that I
don't like it."
"It's on the record," Adam said. "I filed it."
"I know you did." She closed the chart. "File it again."
That Saturday was one of the last kind afternoons of the year, the kind
Goshen Falls got in October as an apology for February. Adam was splitting
kindling at the side of his house โ work he did because it needed doing and
because it gave his hands a verdict to deliver โ and Lily was next door in
Felix Abernathy's yard, where she was not supposed to be without asking and
where Felix was not supposed to feed her the shortbread he fed her every
time, both of them maintaining these fictions with the solemnity of
diplomats.
Felix was eighty-one and had been Ernest Wexford's aide at the council the