did not laugh, and stood a while with Felix Abernathy's good blue shirt in his
mind — eighty-one years old, the last man living who had sat in that room in
March of 1979 and watched Ernest Wexford sign his name to the words
DEDICATED TO PUBLIC USE and heard the gavel and the applause and
the mayor's thanks, ironing his shirt for the town like a bridegroom, like a
pallbearer, like a man keeping the last appointment of a promise the rest of
the room had forgotten it made.
The follow-up at the pulmonologist's office fell on the Friday, up in
Harrisonburg, in a building with fish on the walls and chairs in four sizes. Dr.
Anita Rao listened to Lily's chest with the stethoscope while Lily breathed in
and out on command, deep, deeper, and then blew into the spirometer three
times and made the little markers fly, and the doctor turned to Adam with the
expression of a woman delivering the only kind of news that never needs
varnishing.
"Full recovery," she said. "No residual inflammation I can find, numbers
right back to her baseline. We'll keep the action plan as it is. The event in
October was severe, Mr. Reyes, but it was an event, not a decline. Her lungs
have forgotten it, even if the rest of us haven't." She smiled at Lily. "Kids'
lungs are better at that than the rest of us."
On the drive home, down out of the ridge country with the late light going
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copper in the fields, Lily was quiet a long while in the back seat, in the
thinking posture, chin down, fox in her lap, and Adam knew to let the quiet
run its course, because her questions came the way her attacks once had —
on their own schedule, out of clear air.
"Dad," she said at last. "Is Mrs. Wexford in trouble like jail?"
Adam kept his eyes on the road, where they belonged. "No, baby. Not like
jail."
"Like what, then?"
He thought about the farmhouse, and the letter in the drawer that said gift,
and the car at the foot of the lane with its brake lights on. He thought about
forty-six years of a woman being wrong in front of everybody, and
everybody being too tired and too kind and too late to say so, until saying so
became a hearing, with a witness list, and a good blue shirt ironed for the
occasion.
"She's in trouble like a person who's been wrong a long time," he said, "and
everybody finally said so."
Lily considered this, in the back seat, with the whole of her nine years.
"That's a lot of trouble," she said.
The council chamber had not been built for a crowd, and by six-thirty on
Tuesday, November 18, it was holding one anyway. The regular chairs ran
out early, and somebody — the janitor, Mr. Abernathy's nephew, by the look
of the folding chairs' familiar gray paint — had set out three more rows in the
back, and those were full too, and people were standing along the wall under
the framed photographs of councils past, holding their coats because the coat
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rack had given up at nine and the room was warm with radiators and bodies.
The whole lane was there, seated the way the lane itself was laid out, whether
they meant it or not: the dues-paying households down the left side in a loose
file, the rest scattered, and Bea Wexford in the front row on the right, in the
navy coat she wore to church, with her pocketbook upright on her knees like
a small closed door.
He had come straight from the hospital, in the good shirt he kept on a hanger
in the car for exactly this kind of evening, and he sat in the second row with
his hands folded and tried to slow his own breathing down, which was a
thing he knew how to do for other people. First, the breathing. He had said it
to patients ten thousand times. He said it to himself in the chamber, quietly,
the way other men said a prayer they were no longer sure was addressed to
anyone.
Lily was home with Mrs. Berg's granddaughter, who was seventeen and
responsible and had been given, in writing, on the refrigerator, the list: the
inhaler in the blue pouch, the nebulizer on the counter, the numbers, the
order in which to use them. Lily had asked if she could come. She had said,
in the new flat voice she had used about the lane since October, that it was
her street too. He had told her that it was, and that the best way she could be
in the room was for him to be able to think about the room and not about her
breathing. She had considered this with the seriousness she brought to trades.
Then she had drawn him a picture to take: the lane, their house, a chain
drawn very small and very firmly crossed out, and underneath, in her round
print, OPEN. He had it in his inside pocket. It was the only exhibit he
intended to produce that was not a matter of record.
Mayor Price called the meeting to order at seven with the gavel her
predecessor had left in the desk drawer, a plain wooden thing worn light at
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the head, and the room did the small settling that rooms do. The county
paper's reporter was in the aisle seat of the first row with a notebook already