you. I am glad to hear it from you and not from the store."
Lily, who had been following this in the manner of a person reading a book
in a language she mostly knows, said, "I'm right here," with great dignity,
and Bea turned to her and inclined her head, an actual small bow, grave as a
judge's, in the direction of a nine-year-old in pajamas with a crayon in her
fist.
"So you are," Bea said. "I beg your pardon. It is a fault of the old, asking the
room about a person who is sitting in it. You look well, Lily Reyes."
"Thank you," Lily said. "I have new crayons. Sixty-four. With the sharpener
in the back." And she went back to her blues, and Adam set the kettle going
again, because whatever else this visit was going to be, it was plainly going
to be a thing that required tea.
He pulled out a chair. "Will you sit down, Mrs. Wexford? Please."
She sat with the care of a woman lowering herself into cold water, her coat
still on, her scarf still pinned. Adam made the tea and sat down across from
her, and Lily drew on at the far end of the table, in the silence of a child who
has been told in a look that this is grown-up weather.
"I went up to the attic on Tuesday night," Bea said, without preamble. "After
the hearing. I did not sleep Monday night, and Tuesday I did not sleep either,
and on Tuesday night I went up the stairs with a flashlight, because the attic
bulb has been dead since spring, and I opened Ernest's cedar chest." She said
the name of the chest the way you say the name of a relative.
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"It has sat at the foot of our bed, and then at the foot of my bed, since
nineteen seventy-one. I have put linens in it ten thousand times, but the
bottom of it — there is a board that lifts — I had not lifted that board since
the week of his funeral." She turned her cup a quarter turn on the saucer. "I
went up to find a deed. That is what I went for. I want you to understand the
errand, Mr. Reyes, because what a person goes looking for says as much as
what she finds. I went to find the paper that would prove the council and the
whole roomful of them wrong. I could see it. I could see the ribbon on it.
"The certificate was in a frame," she said. "Under the board, with glass.
Ernest's dedication certificate, that the town gave him in March of
seventy-nine. It is written out in his own hand. He had a beautiful hand,
Ernest. Copperplate, they called it at school. Presented to Ernest W.
Wexford, in recognition of the dedication of Wexford Lane to the Town of
Goshen Falls, for public use in perpetuity. In perpetuity. He wrote the words
out fair and he framed them, and there they have sat under the linens for
forty-six years.
"And the letter," she said. "Under the certificate. Folded in an envelope with
nothing written on it. Dated inside. October, twenty fifteen."
She reached then — slowly, telegraphing the movement the way you do
around a hurt animal — into the inside pocket of her coat, and brought out an
envelope gone soft with six years in the dark, and laid it on the table between
them, square to the table's edge. She did not push it toward him. She set it
down in the neutral ground of the table and folded both hands around her
teacup.
"I have read it eleven times," she said. "I would like you to read it once. Not
for the town. Not for the record — the town has its record, and God knows it
was read aloud enough on Monday. Because when I think of who on that
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lane is owed the sight of it, it is the man whose little girl — " She stopped,
and did not restart the sentence. She lifted her cup, and drank, and set it
down, and said, with terrible plainness: "Read it, please, Mr. Reyes. I will sit
here. I have gotten very good, this week, at sitting in rooms while things are
read."
Adam picked up the envelope. The paper inside had gone the color of weak
tea at the folds. Three pages. The hand was everything she had promised —
upright, unhurried — and Adam, whose professional life was reading
doctors' scrawl, found himself slowing to the pace of the handwriting.
My dear Bea, Ernest had begun, and then, in the plain style of a man who has
been told a number by a doctor and has decided to be exact with the time that
remains: The news from Charlottesville is not good, and it is not the kind of
not-good that improves, and so I am putting some things in order, and this
letter is the largest of them, and I find I am a coward about the posting of it.
Bea, across the table, did not watch his face. She watched the window over
his shoulder, where the lane was.
The street was never ours to keep, Bea. That is the sum of it, so I will write it
first and plain. In March of nineteen seventy-nine I signed the dedication and
recorded it with the town, Plat Book 9, page 41, and Wexford Lane became a
public street — for the paving, and for the taxes, and because I believed then