ordered, and the two posts at the lane's mouth had been cut off at grade and
patched, and Bea had handed back the dues money and the dues notebook
and the padlock itself through Adam, in a paper grocery sack, without a
speech. Since then she had been a woman in the process of setting something
down, and the street had learned to give the process room. Felix Abernathy,
who at eighty-one had opinions the way other men had weather vanes, said it
best from his porch in April: "She's carrying it to the curb, folks. You don't
honk at a person carrying something heavy to the curb."
Now the paving crew worked its way down the lane, house by house, and the
lane came out to watch the way it had once come out to argue. The couple at
number six brought out lawn chairs. The twins from number eleven were
given the flagger's spare vest to take turns wearing, under supervision, for
exactly four minutes each, timed by their mother with the gravity of a treaty.
Someone's radio played low. The water truck made its passes. And Bea sat at
the far end of it all and watched the town maintain its street, and if there was
grief in it for her there was also something else, something Adam recognized
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from the ER, from the families who sat in the plastic chairs at three in the
morning and watched the machines do the work they could not do
themselves: relief, arriving in disguise, ashamed of its own timing.
On Wednesday, in the worst of the midday heat, the lane witnessed the
transaction it would talk about for the rest of the spring, and it took perhaps
ninety seconds. The crew had knocked off for lunch in the shade of their
trucks at the turnaround, and the water truck's tank had run to its dregs, and
down the farmhouse steps came Bea Wexford, unhurried, carrying a
two-gallon jug of iced tea in both arms with a stack of paper cups tucked
under her chin. She set the jug on the crew chief's tailgate. She did not
explain it, or accompany it with terms, or wait to be thanked in any formal
way. The crew chief, who was twenty-six and had been on the lane three
days and understood its politics the way you understand weather in a country
you're passing through, said, "Ma'am, that's kind," and Bea said, "It's hot,"
which was not a reply so much as a fact she was willing to co-sign, and went
back up her steps and took her chair again. The crew drank her tea all
afternoon, in shifts, and at the end of the day the chief washed the jug at the
water truck's spigot and carried it up the steps himself and set it by her door,
and raised his voice just enough: "Thank you, Mrs. Wexford." And she
nodded from the porch — once, like a flag acknowledging another flag —
and that was the whole of it. The street had been maintained by its owner for
two days. On the third day its oldest resident had watered the crew, and
nobody on Wexford Lane was under any illusion that these were separate
events.
On Thursday the crew laid the new asphalt, and the smell of it — hot tar,
clean and chemical and oddly sweet — rolled down the lane ahead of the
steamroller. Lily walked the edge of the fresh mat where the flagger allowed
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it, on the grass, and pressed her sneaker once, carefully, into a corner the
roller hadn't reached, and then looked at Adam with the guilt already
arranged on her face, and he said, "That is a tradition older than this town,"
and she grinned and ran back up the lane with the black print on her sole like
a stamp.
Friday morning, before the lines were even painted, the sign truck came.
Adam was home because the schedule had given him the day, one of those
floating mercies of shift work, and he walked Lily down to the mouth of the
lane to see it: two men in town vests, a post already set, and the sign itself —
standard, green, reflective, unremarkable as a license plate. WEXFORD
LANE, it said, in white capital letters, exactly like every other street sign in
Goshen Falls, exactly like the signs on Route 11 and Church Street and the
road to the high school. Below it, smaller, on the same post, the town had
mounted the little brown marker the county used for public ways, with the
route number nobody would ever call it by. The sign said nothing about
whose it was. That was the entire sermon of it. It said the street's name, and
the street's name was enough, and the post stood in town dirt on town land at
the mouth of a town street, and traffic went past on Route 11 — a feed truck,
a school van, a woman in a silver car who slowed, read it, and turned in to
visit number nine without slowing for anything, because there was nothing to
slow for.
The hand-painted sign it replaced had leaned at that corner for as long as
Adam had lived on the lane — WEXFORD LANE — PRIVATE in Bea's
upright, careful lettering, white paint on a board her husband had cut, the
letters retraced every few years in a slightly different white so that up close it
had read like a palimpsest of insistence. The town crew had orders to take it