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the period."
"Like the period," Bea repeated. "May I — would you let this stay with me a
while? I would put it on my icebox. I have a magnet shaped like a strawberry
that has held nothing but a calendar since two thousand nineteen, and it
would be glad of the work."
"You can keep it till spring," Lily said, with the air of a small queen granting
a term of years. "In spring I'll make the new one. With the road fixed."
"With the road fixed," Bea said. "Yes. I will hold you to that, and hold this
till then."
She stood to go not long after, and refused, with a return of her ordinary
firmness that Adam found he was obscurely glad to see, his offer to drive her
back up the lane. "I walked down it," she said. "I will walk up it." At the door
she paused, and looked back at the table — at the padlock and the notebook
and the coffee can sitting among the teacups, waiting for their ride to town
hall — and something in her face did the settling thing again, smaller this
time, barely a sound at all.
"It fits in a grocery bag," she said, half to herself. "Forty years. It fits in a
grocery bag, and it is heavy as a body. You will see it gets there, Mr. Reyes."
"I'll see it gets there," Adam said.
He stood in the doorway and watched her go up the lane in her church coat
and her walking shoes, unhurried, all the way to where the chain still hung.
Lily came and stood against his side, under his hand, and breathed — in, out,
easy — and watched with him until Bea reached the chain, and ducked it,
being smaller than her own legend, and was gone into the house.
"Is she still the chain lady?" Lily asked.
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"She's Mrs. Wexford," Adam said. "She's the lady at the end of the road."
"That's what I said," Lily said, reasonably, and went in to finish the toast.
The town's notice went out on Wednesday: the removal of the chain, posts,
and signage on Wexford Lane was scheduled for the first full week of
December, weather permitting. Kyle Wexford came by the house on
Thursday evening and said his aunt would not need a court's paper after all,
and that he himself would be there with his truck to haul the posts. "She has
slept, though," Kyle said. "First time since the hearing." Then he went down
the steps into the dark, and Adam stood awhile in his doorway, and thought:
first, the breathing. All the rest is commentary on the breathing.
Elaine Wexford called on Saturday morning, and her voice on the phone was
her mother's voice with the edges taken off by distance. She had come down
Friday night, she said. Kyle had called her. She wondered if Adam would
come up to the farmhouse Sunday after dinner, for coffee. Not a summons. A
request. Her mother wished the town to know she would cooperate with the
removal crews, fully and in writing if the town wanted it in writing, and
wished that word to travel by a person and not by a telephone, and had
named the person.
So Adam walked up the lane on the second Sunday, in the blue hour, past the
place where the chain still hung — one more week of it, and then the town's
men and Kyle's truck — and up the Wexford drive to the farmhouse. He had
been inside it only once in his life: years back, when he and Anna had first
bought the little house and Bea had received them with the formality of a
border inspection, and sent them home with preserves and a printed set of the
lane's customs, most of which she had invented. The kitchen window was lit
and steamed. He knocked, three raps, unhurried, and heard chairs move
inside.
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Elaine opened the door. She was forty-nine and she had her father's face,
Adam thought — the long bones of it, the deep-set patience. Behind her the
kitchen was warm and smelled of coffee and woodsmoke. Bea sat at the table
in a housecoat and cardigan, which was somehow more startling than the
grocery bag had been: the church coat's absence. She looked smaller. She
looked the way patients looked on the second day, when the crisis had passed
and the long ordinary convalescence began.
"Mr. Reyes," Bea said. "You are in my kitchen. The world is upside down
and I find I do not entirely mind the view."
Elaine had his coat before he could hang it himself, and coffee on the table.
"Sit, please. Mother's been rehearsing."
"I have not been rehearsing," Bea said. "I have been deciding. There is a
difference, though I grant it may not be visible from Richmond."
"It is visible from anywhere, Mama," Elaine said, without heat, and sat
down, and Adam sat, and there the three of them were, at the farmhouse
table, and between them — where an envelope had lain on Adam's table the
Sunday before — lay Ernest's letter, out of its envelope now, its three pages
squared and aligned. Nobody touched it. It did its work by being there.
"The chest is moved," Elaine said, presently, to Adam, as if reporting on a
joint project whose terms had been agreed. "We did it yesterday, the two of
us, sliding it on towels so as not to mark the floor. It's in the sunroom now,