look of a man carrying somebody else's conclusion."
"You could say that, Peg."
"Then set it here, and we'll conclude it properly." She cleared a space on the
counter, and Adam set the bag down and took out its contents one by one, in
the order Bea had set them out for him: the padlock with its two links of cut
chain, the ruled notebook, the red coffee can.
Peg looked at the three things for a moment without touching them. Adam
knew the face she was wearing from nineteen years of emergencies: the face
of a person who understands that an object on a counter is sometimes a
whole human life arranged in a row, and that you gave it a second of quiet
before you started processing it.
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"She walked it down to you herself," Peg said. It was not a question. "The
garage told me by eight this morning. This town." She pulled the can toward
her and worked the lid off with a thumbnail. "Let's count it, Mr. Reyes.
Money gets counted in the open or it gets counted in people's imaginations,
and imaginations in Goshen Falls run to the extravagant."
She counted it twice, in banded stacks, because Peg Sullivan trusted no count
she had only taken once, not even her own. One thousand nine hundred and
forty dollars. She wrote the figure on a slip in her small, square hand and laid
it on top of the money before she snapped the lid back on, so the number
would travel with the can wherever the can went next. Ending things was
Peg's profession, and she did it clean or not at all.
The receipt she wrote in triplicate. Town of Goshen Falls, received of Adam
Reyes, for Beatrice Wexford: one padlock with chain links, one ruled
notebook, one coffee can containing $1,940 in currency and coin, being the
unspent lane dues of Wexford Lane, surrendered voluntarily following the
council's ruling of November 18. She signed it. She had Adam sign it. She
separated the copies — one for him, one for the file, one that she would drive
up the lane herself and hand to Bea Wexford in person, "because a woman
who surrenders a thing deserves to hold the paper that says it was received."
The notebook she did not hurry over. She opened it gently and turned the
first pages: 1985, in Bea's upright hand, the names of five households and the
months ruled off in pencil lines gone faint as veins, twenty dollars, twenty
dollars, twenty dollars, year after ruled year. Gravel, noted. Chain oil. Sign,
replaced. Postage. Nothing wasted; nothing, in all the forty years, taken.
Whatever else the dues had been, they had never been theft.
"This goes with the plat book," she said at last, and closed it. "Book 9.
There's a pocket in the back of the binding — the dedication certificate
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copy's in there, and the '79 survey, and now this. His instrument and her
ledger, in the same pocket, where anybody who needs it in fifty years can lay
a hand on it." She slid the notebook into a manila envelope and wrote on the
envelope in her square hand, and her voice, when she spoke again, had gone
as close to tenderness as Peg Sullivan's voice was ever going to go in a
public building.
"Forty years of keeping, and it all fits in a coffee can. Paper's a mercy, Mr.
Reyes. It ends things clean."
The town came to pave Wexford Lane on the first Tuesday of May, and they
came the way weather comes, all at once and with equipment. Adam Reyes
stood in his own driveway with a mug gone lukewarm in his hand and
watched a milling machine the size of a small house take the old surface off
the lane in long gray curls, and he thought, not for the first time, that there
were miracles a man could schedule. This was one of them. It had a work
order. It had a crew of six and a flagger at the Route 11 mouth and a water
truck keeping the dust down, and it was happening to his street, in daylight,
because the street was the town's and the town had finally come to do what
owners do.
Lily stood beside him in her school clothes with her backpack already on,
because the bus situation was still new enough that neither of them entirely
trusted it, and she watched the milling machine with the total attention she
usually saved for horses and thunderstorms. "It's eating it," she said.
"It's taking off the old skin," Adam said. "So the new one holds."
"Does it hurt the road?"
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"Roads don't feel it. That's the whole advantage of being a road."
She considered this with the seriousness of a nine-year-old — ten in June,
she reminded everyone now, as if the number were already hers — and then
she said, "Bea's watching," and he looked up the lane to the farmhouse at the
far end, where Bea Wexford sat on her porch in her good chair with her
hands folded in her lap, watching the crew work the way she had watched
everything on this street for forty years: completely, and as if the watching
were a job she had been hired to do and intended to do well.
She said nothing. That was the thing the whole lane noticed, in the days that
followed, and the thing the whole lane, to its credit, chose to respect. The
chain had come down in December at town expense, as the council had