Bea Wexford has watched my house every day of them. Every day. When
the pipes went in '09 she was in my kitchen with towels before the plumber's
truck turned in. When my sister died she drove me to the airport at four in the
morning in February and never said a word about the hour. If a strange car
slows down on that lane, Bea knows its plate before it's past the curve, and I
am an old woman who lives alone, and I have slept the better for it every
night for forty-one years. The chain is why. You can call it what it is in your
book. I am telling you what it is in my house. It is the reason I sleep." She
folded her hands. "I paid the dues glad, too. Write that down too."
And it was Odessa Berg, at the end, who finished it. She was eighty-two, the
oldest person in the room, and she lived at number 4, in the house closest to
Bea's after Adam's own. Her grandson, a tall boy in a letterman jacket, stood
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behind her chair with his hands ready and never once needed, and she rose
slowly, holding the chair back, declining the lectern, speaking from where
she stood the way a person speaks from their own porch. "I have known Bea
Wexford since she came to that house a bride," she said. "I knew her
mother-in-law. I knew Ernest. I have eaten at her table maybe two hundred
times and she has eaten at mine, and there is nobody in this room, including
her daughter — " and here Adam became aware, all at once, of a woman
standing at the back wall by the coat rack, in a dark coat, who had not been
there when he testified, and who was looking at her mother the way you look
at weather coming over a ridge, and it was Elaine, three years gone from that
lane, come back into the warm room without a seat. "— including her
daughter," Odessa Berg said, "who knows her better than I do, or loves her
better." She turned, with care, so that some part of what she said went toward
the front row. "We love her," she said. "That is true and you can write it. We
are also tired of asking to come home. That is also true. Both of them fit in
the same house. They've been fitting in the same house for forty years. I am
too old to keep paying for the fit." She sat down into her grandson's steady
hands, and the room was quiet in a new way, the way a room is quiet when
the last true thing has been said and everyone present knows it is the last one,
and into that quiet Mayor Price, gently, the way you close a door that
someone else will need to open again, called the name of Felix Abernathy.
Felix Abernathy came up the aisle slowly and entirely upright, in a shirt so
thoroughly ironed that it seemed to hold its shape independent of the man
inside it. He was eighty-one. He had been a council aide in 1979 — a young
man's job, carrying paper between rooms — and he was, Peg Sullivan had
told Adam in October with the air of a woman producing the last of
something, the only living person who had been in the room when the
dedication was moved, besides Bea herself. He took the lectern in both
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hands, not for support; for custody. He looked once at the glowing plat on the
wall, and something passed over his face that Adam, who read faces for a
living, could not file under any single word: the look of a man seeing his own
youth projected six feet tall and finding that it held up.
"I was in the room," Felix said. "March 1979. It wasn't this room — it was
the old chamber, over the fire hall — but it was the same table, near enough.
I carried the plat in from the surveyor's office in a tube. Ernest Wexford
brought it to the town; the town didn't take it from him. I want that order of
events correct, because I've heard it told the other way since October and the
other way is wrong. He brought it." He adjusted the microphone down an
inch, with the confidence of a man who had adjusted a thousand of them for
other people. "The old county road flooded twice that winter and the school
bus couldn't get through to the farmhouses on the lane for nine days
altogether. Ernest stood up at that meeting — he wasn't a councilman, he was
a farmer with a road through his land — and he said the lane ought to be the
town's, graded by the town, plowed by the town, and open to anybody's bus
or anybody's ambulance, forever, and that he'd sign the paper that night so
nobody could ever make it a question again. And the council voted, and he
signed it. That one." He did not reach for Bill Trask's pointer, resting on the
table. He pointed with his own hand, and the hand was steady. "That's his
hand. I watched it write."
Mayor Price asked, formally, whether he recalled Ernest Wexford's words at
that meeting, and Felix said he did, and the room went down into the deepest
quiet it had yet found.
"He said it during the discussion, when old Commissioner Yuen — he's gone
now — asked him whether he understood he'd be giving up the say over who