package taken off a porch. Not one. You may check with Felix Abernathy,
who remembers everything and agrees with some of it. On weekends I put
the chain up across the farm end" โ she gestured up the lane with two
fingers, the way a conductor indicates the brass โ "for your protection.
Against the through-traffic and the racers. The high-school boys found us
one summer, oh, ten years gone, cutting through to Route Eleven with their
mufflers off, and a baby in a stroller at number nine โ well. The chain ended
that. The county knows. The county understands. Ernest always said a street
is a promise you make with your own hands."
"It sounds," Adam said carefully, "like a lot of tending for one person."
7
"It is the exact amount of tending a street requires," said Bea Wexford.
"People imagine a street maintains itself, like weather. A street is maintained
like a marriage, Mr. Reyes. Daily, and by somebody who means it." She
turned her head then, at a sound up the lane, and Adam followed her gaze:
Lily, home from her first half-day of school visits โ no, not school, the
school tour, Carla had arranged it โ Lily was coming down the farmhouse
steps. Adam's heart performed the small, familiar arithmetic before his mind
caught up: she had gone up the lane on her bike while he was on the ladder,
and she had gone, uninvited and entirely unbothered, onto the farmhouse
porch, and she was coming down now with a cookie in each hand and the air
of a diplomat returning from a successful summit.
"She knocked," Bea said, with deep approval. "Knocked and waited to be
asked. I gave her shortbread." A pause, in which something in the older
woman's face arranged itself into an expression Adam would not learn to
read for some time โ it was the expression of a woman whose list had just
acquired, in her own hand, a new and satisfactory entry. "She has the asthma.
Carla told the lane that too. She told me on the porch. 'I have to be careful
with running,' she said, 'but bikes are mostly sitting.' Sensible child. She'll do
well here. This is a careful street. Nothing on this street," said Bea Wexford,
"is ever in a hurry."
Lily arrived, braked, presented a cookie upward. "Dad. She has a cat named
Chairman. He sits in a chair. That's why."
"Is that so."
"And she has rules for the whole street and she wrote them nowhere, she just
knows them. And her house smells like the school library and soup."
"Then we've been welcomed," Adam said, and Bea โ hearing herself
8
summarized, accurately and without malice, by a nine-year-old with
shortbread on her chin โ laughed, a real laugh, surprised out of her, and it
changed her face the way sun changes a field.
"Forty minutes at three-fifty," she said to Adam, recovering her dignity
around the laugh like a shawl. "And Mr. Reyes โ the chain. On Saturdays. If
you come home from your hospital in the dark and find it up, you come
round by the farm track, behind the barn, it's kept clear. Or you telephone the
house and I'll come down. I am up early. I am up," she said, "before anything
on this street."
She walked back up the lane with the tea towel over her arm, at the pace of a
woman inspecting a border she expects to hold, and the black cat rose and
followed her at the distance of a professional colleague.
On Thursday โ their third full day โ Adam was in the driveway with the
hose, washing the moving dust off the car, when the delivery van came down
Route 11 and slowed at the mouth of the lane, and stopped. It did not turn in.
It sat there, hazards ticking, while the driver leaned out of his window and
studied the sign the way a man studies a fence with a dog behind it, and
Adam, with the hose going slack in his hand, understood that he was about to
watch the choreography performed for a stranger.
Bea came out of the farmhouse gate before the driver's door had finished
opening. She was not hurrying; hurrying was not in the repertoire; she
arrived the way weather arrives, as a condition of the place. Words were
exchanged at a distance too far for Adam to hear, though not too far to read:
the driver held up the shipping label like a passport; Bea read it; Bea read the
driver; Bea pointed once, down the lane, with the whole arm, a traffic
officer's point softened by forty years of practice into something closer to a
blessing with directions attached. The driver nodded, got back in, and drove
9
the long curve at a speed that suggested a man transporting eggs in a vehicle
full of anvils, and delivered Adam's package โ a box of Lily's books, late by
two days and forgiven on sight โ with both hands and a look of mild
astonishment, as if he had been personally cleared through a border he hadn't
known was there.
"You see how it works," Bea said, passing on her way back up the lane with
the cat at her heels. She did not stop walking. "He has it in his route book
now. Reyes, number fourteen, the nurse. The new ones always stop at the
sign their first time. They learn. They all learn, Mr. Reyes. That's all a street
is โ a thing people have learned."
Adam stood in his driveway with his daughter's books in his arms and