That's what you should know going into your hearing. It isn't greed and it
isn't spite. She believes she is the last one doing a job the town abandoned.
Whatever you all decide on the eighteenth — she'll hear it as the town firing
her from the only work she has left." At the door she stopped. "How do I tell
my mother the street was never hers without telling her her whole life was a
mistake? Because those are the same sentence, Mr. Reyes. I've had three
years to find a way to split them and I can't."
She left without finishing the coffee, and she drove out the back track the
way she had come, and Adam, watching from the window because he was a
man who had learned that watching was sometimes the only available form
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of respect, saw her car come down to the county road and slow at the turn for
the lane — saw it stop, in fact, at the foot of Wexford Lane, where the chain
was, with the farmhouse above it in the bare trees. It sat there a long minute.
The brake lights were on. He could picture her hands on the wheel, and the
plat book she'd once carried up that hill, and the stove. Then the brake lights
went out and the gray sedan pulled away toward Richmond, and Adam stood
in his window a while longer, thinking that the chain had kept out an
ambulance and a bride and a dying man's nurse, but the heaviest thing it had
ever held back was that car, and it had held.
Kyle Wexford's break with his aunt did not happen in Adam's presence, and
Adam was glad of it, because it was a family thing and it came to him the
way family things come to a street — carried, a day later, by Doris Yamada
with the noodles, and confirmed, in a different tone, by Kyle himself, who
stopped his tow truck at Adam's mailbox on the Tuesday and got out with his
cap in his hands like a man at a graveside he was not sure he was invited to.
"You'll hear it crooked from the street, so hear it straight from me," Kyle
said. "Sunday I went up to the farmhouse. Satellite dish man from over in
Staunton had called her Saturday — his van got turned at the chain in
September and he'd complained to his company and the company was
threatening to stop servicing the whole lane — and she'd got the idea I
should tow him off if he came back. Anybody. She had a list, Adam. Cars
she'd seen go through when the chain was down for the oil delivery. She
wanted me to start collecting them." The cap turned once in his hands. "I told
her I'm done. I told her I've towed eleven cars off this lane in nine years on
her say-so — eleven, I counted my own books, my own father taught me to
keep books — and not one of them had a piece of paper behind it, and I will
not tow another car off Wexford Lane without a court's paper with a judge's
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name on it. Not for her. Not for anybody."
"And she said?" Adam asked.
"Nothing," Kyle said. "That's what I'm telling you. My aunt has had an
answer for everything since I was four years old. She stood in her kitchen
with her hand on that notebook of hers and she said nothing at all, and I
understood I'd finally said the one thing there wasn't an answer filed under. I
left the list on her table. It can sit there." He put the cap back on, slowly, like
a man re-entering a weather he'd chosen. "Lily's all right? They said at the
garage she was all right."
"She's all right, Kyle."
"Then it's just the street, then," he said, and got back in his truck, "and the
street'll keep till the eighteenth." He drove off down the lane he was no
longer willing to police, and Adam watched him go and thought about
notebooks — Bea's ruled one with its twenty-dollar lines, Kyle's tow books,
his own charting hand, a whole family, a whole town, keeping records like a
religion, and how the records had finally all been opened at once, and what
that had cost every single keeper.
The hearing notice came to Adam's house on Thursday, by certified mail, in
a heavy envelope with the green card, and the mail carrier — who had
herself once waited at that chain with a parcel van and a dying schedule, and
said so, standing on his porch, with the air of a woman entering testimony
early — waited while he signed.
WITNESS NOTICE. In the matter of the status of Wexford Lane and the
removal of obstructions therefrom. Hearing before the Town Council of
Goshen Falls, November 18, six o'clock in the evening, Council Chamber.
He was to be present, and to be sworn, and to testify as to the events of
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October 11. His name was typed in a list: A. Reyes; Capt. L. Nakamura,
EMS; W. Trask, surveyor; F. Abernathy. Peg had appended, in pencil, in her
clerk's hand, a note that had no business on an official document and every
business in the world on this one: Felix got his today too. He's ironing his
good shirt. The blue one. He says a man doesn't testify about 1979 in a shirt
he hasn't ironed.
Adam laughed, alone on his porch, with the envelope in his hand, and then