Adam looked at the chain. He looked at the hook, at the center of it, at the
simplest piece of hardware on Wexford Lane. He thought about his bed,
which was two hundred feet and one hook away. He thought about Lily,
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asleep at Felix's — no, at home, with Felix's granddaughter Mara, sixteen
and certified and paid in advance, asleep on the couch with one ear open the
way good sitters sleep. He thought about the choreography, and the steps,
which Felix had said were not heavy steps.
"Mrs. Wexford," he said. "Bea. I can just—" and he reached out, and because
his hands were a nurse's hands and hooks were a small and honest
technology, he lifted the chain off its post on his side before she'd taken three
steps, and the whole arrangement sagged and whispered down into the wet
grass, and he drove his car through the gap at the pace of a man carrying
water, stopped on the far side, got out, and hooked the chain up again behind
him, neatly, link seated, sign facing out. The entire rebellion had taken ninety
seconds and had the energy, all of it, of a man refiling a chart.
Bea watched it the way one watches weather decide to happen anyway.
When he was done she inclined her head — not approval, not quite; an entry
made — and said, "You're handy with a hook. Ernest was handy with a hook.
The racers stand on the road and rattle it and shout, and drive around through
the number nine yard, and I have to have the ruts filled. You'll do." She
picked up her mug. "The farm track is there, all the same. For your guests."
"For my guests," Adam agreed, in the tone of a man accepting a chart he
intends to read later.
"Sleep well, Mr. Reyes. Nights." She said it like a diagnosis she intended to
keep an eye on. "This street is quiet in the daytime. I see to it personally. It's
one of the tending's chief articles."
He slept six hours behind the blackout curtains in a silence so complete it had
texture, and woke at two to Lily at the kitchen table with her shoes off and
her tongue in the corner of her mouth, drawing. She had drawn the lane — he
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saw it upside down first, crossing with the coffee: the long curve of it,
fourteen houses in crayon, each with its tree, each with its flag of a mailbox,
the farmhouse at the head drawn biggest and most carefully, with a porch,
and on the porch a figure in a chair, and along the bottom of the page, in the
sky-blue she used for important things, a bicycle with a girl on it, mid-flight
down the middle of the empty street.
"That's Bea," Lily said, of the figure. "She's watching everything so it's safe.
That's her job in the picture. I gave her the big chair."
"And who's that?" he asked, of the bicycle.
"That's me, not being in a hurry." She capped the blue. "She said nothing
here is in a hurry. That's the rule I like best so far."
That evening Mara went home with a drawing of her own — a cat, black,
enthroned — and Adam made soup, because soup was the meal he could
cook while tired and it made the house smell like somebody intended to live
in it, and at dusk he took his bowl out to the porch and let the day finish
spending itself. The lane turned the colors it evidently turned every evening,
gold to rose to the particular blue that comes down between houses like a
held note resolving, and the chain, he noticed, had been taken down again —
hooks empty, posts bare, the lane open from end to end the way it was on
weekdays, Bea's border unlatched at the hour when even borders rest. Felix's
porch light came on. Somewhere a sprinkler began its evening round of
applause.
Lily came out with her helmet already on, which was her way of asking, and
he nodded, and she went down the steps and mounted up and rode.
She rode the whole length of it this time, slowly — from their porch to the
farmhouse, the long curve unspooling under her wheels, and at the
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farmhouse she did not stop but circled, wide and careful, in the flat apron of
light at the head of the lane, and Adam, watching, saw the farmhouse porch,
and on it, in the rocker, in the last of the gold, Beatrice Wexford. Lily raised
one hand off the handlebar as she passed — rang no bell, attempted nothing
showy, only the wave — and Bea, after a moment in which the whole street
seemed to hold itself still to allow it, raised one hand in return, high and
unhurried, half wave and half benediction, the gesture of a woman blessing
the traffic on a road she had kept since before the girl's mother was born.
Lily came back down the lane with the dusk at her back, breathing easy,
shoulders loose, in the green zone and coasting, and braked to a stop at the
foot of their steps with her hair stuck to her forehead and the whole unhurried
street reflected, briefly, in the confidence of her face.
"Best road," she announced. "Best road in Virginia. Possibly the world."
"Possibly," Adam said. "Park the bike. Soup's on, and the nebulizer's jealous
of the toaster's chair time."
She went in ahead of him, and he stayed a moment longer on the porch of