watched her go, and what he felt was not resentment and not alarm, which
surprised him enough to examine it. It was something closer to being
onboarded. At the hospital, new staff were walked through the unit by
whoever had run it longest, and the tour was always half protocol and half
superstition, and the superstition was always the part that kept people alive.
He had been walked through Wexford Lane for three days by its
longest-serving nurse, and everything she had shown him — the list, the
chain, the checking-in of guests, the cans by six — had the same quality as
the superstition half of a unit tour: excessive, unshakeable, and almost
certainly load-bearing in ways he had not yet seen stressed.
That evening was the first Thursday, and at five minutes to six he wheeled
the trash can down his own driveway to the curb because the house had
produced exactly one bag and a forest of broken-down boxes, and he stood
there a moment taking the lane's temperature — and saw, down the curve, at
five fifty-five by the clock in his head, the woman at number nine come out
in her robe and walk her can down at a pace just short of a trot, and set it, and
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straighten it, and align its lid with a small adjustment of the handle, and go
back inside at the same pace, as if a bell only she could hear had rung and
been answered. Nobody else's can was out yet. Nobody else's can was ever
going to be late, either; Adam could feel the hour assembling itself up and
down the street, behind fourteen doors, in a rhythm older than his tenancy by
four decades. He went back in and told Lily, who was testing the nebulizer's
chair arrangement against a stuffed animal, that trash went out by six on this
street.
"I know," she said. "Bea told me at shortbread. Six is when the truck knows
where we live."
Felix Abernathy introduced himself the following afternoon by means of a
ladder, a pair of pruning shears, and the fence between their yards, over
which he was cutting back a wisteria that had been making its own
arrangements since approximately the bicentennial. He was eighty-one, long
and hinged like a deck chair, with a white mustache and the unhurried quality
of a man who had spent forty years as a council aide in Goshen Falls, which
is to say a man professionally trained to know where things were buried and
to speak of them only in the passive voice.
"Heard the chicken divan arrived," he said. "That means you're on the list
proper. She has a notebook. Ruled. The dues are in it too, but she won't have
mentioned those yet — twenty dollars a month, cash, five of us pay it, the
older houses. Lane dues, she calls them. The association lapsed, oh —" he
considered the wisteria "— in ought-three, as a legal entity, but Bea never
got the news, or got it and declined it. There's a difference, and on this lane
the difference is load-bearing."
"Dues for what, exactly?" Adam asked.
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"For the tending," Felix said. "The sign gets painted. The chain gets a new
hook when it wants one. The pansies get planted. A man comes twice a year
to grade the farm track, since the chain went up, because the county won't
send its trucks past a chain, and Bea took that as a compliment to her
arrangements. Ernest deducted it all on paper somewhere, I expect, and the
paper's gone now, and what remains is the habit." He snipped a long runner
and laid it along the fence top like evidence. "You'll want to know how it
works, son, and it works like this: we arrange around her. It's easier. Ernest
kept this lane like a garden, and Bea keeps it like a border, and she's the
widow of the man who built every house on it except hers, and half the street
still sees his face when they look at her mailbox. You can fight the weather if
it makes you feel young. Most of us got tired of being wet."
"Has anyone ever just — told her? That the association lapsed. That the
street—"
"Felix Abernathy has told her," said Felix, "in 2004, with the county letter in
my hand, standing in her kitchen, with Ernest eighteen months in the ground
and the ink still wet on everything. She read it. She folded it into the letter
opener — she keeps the opener in a drawer with the string — and she said,
'The county may administer what it likes, Felix. This lane was kept by a
Wexford before there was a form for it.' And then she made tea. And the
thing of it is—" He paused, and for a moment the shears rested, and Adam
saw that there was no triumph in the old man at all, only a kind of weathered
affection. "The thing of it is, the lane is lovely. It is the loveliest street in the
county, and it is lovely because for forty-six years one woman has treated it
like a reliquary. Every hedge. Every mailbox at the regulation height — her
regulation. Kids grew up here thinking a street was supposed to look like a
held note. You move in with your girl and her lungs, Mr. Reyes, and you will
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breathe air that Bea Wexford has personally supervised since before you
were born. My advice — and I give it as a man who once filed the town's