CHAPTER 15
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The hinge is a cheap one, brass over steel, and somebody's grandson has spent a year swinging on the door. Three screws turn in mush. I plug the holes with glue and toothpicks and stand there while it sets, because that's the trick, and the trick always works.
Twenty minutes later the door hangs true and shuts with a sound you'd pay for.
I can fix anything with a screw in it. Give me something with a signature on it and I'm a man in a parking lot holding his hat.
Bramwell's under the bench where he always is, one folded ear flat to the concrete, taking up all of the cool patch and none of the work. Brennan Systems is three people. Today it's one and a dog, and the dog contributes less than you'd hope.
The shop smells like cut copper and WD-40 and last night's takeaway carton, which I keep meaning to walk out to the bin and keep not walking.
“You're allowed to earn your keep any time,” I tell him. “There's a whole box of cable clips over there with your name on it, and I've seen you open a bin lid when you thought nobody was watching.”
He rolls onto his side. That's his answer to most things.
I make it to half past nine before I go for the boxes.
They're on the high shelf, three of them, ARDENWOOD in marker down the side in my own bad capitals.
Six years of that house. Panel schedules, camera runs, the day I rewired the gatehouse and the day I wished I hadn't.
I haven't driven out there in three days and it's been sitting on me like weather.
A contract I can read is a thing I can argue with. That's the whole plan. That's the entire plan.
I drag the middle box down and sit on an upturned crate with it between my boots, and Bramwell comes over and leans his whole weight against my shin, the way he does, like he's holding me down for my own good.
“I'm going to do a stupid thing,” I tell him, “and I want it on the record that you didn't stop me.”
He doesn't move. That's consent where I come from.
The service contract's near the bottom, in a plastic sleeve, three pages and an insurance rider stapled behind it.
I've read the front page maybe twice in six years.
You sign, you invoice, you go. Payer line says Vantance, which I always took for tidiness, a rich man's accountant keeping the house and the money in separate rooms.
Behind the rider there's a fourth page I have never once looked at.
It's a court order, and it isn't the flimsy copy you'd get in the post, either. It's the certified one, with a raised seal you can feel under your thumb like a coin under paper.
It authorises the contract. My contract. The alarm work, the door work, the camera runs, the response call-outs, all of it, provided by an approved vendor under order of the court.
There's a judge's signature at the bottom. Just a first initial and a long tired line, the way a man signs when he's signed forty of them before lunch.
I put my thumb on the seal and hold it there.
The order references a petition. The petition has a number and a name, and the name is Evelyn Vance, and the words in front of it are the protected person.
I read that phrase four times and it does not improve.
Bramwell's chin arrives on my knee, damp, uninvited, timed like he's been waiting his whole life for it.
“Protected person. That's a phrase somebody paid for,” I say to him.
He looks up at me with his good ear working and his bad one doing what it always does, which is nothing.
I carry the page to the bench where the light's better and read it again standing up, in case standing helps. The shop's very quiet. The fridge in the corner kicks on and makes me jump like a kid caught at something.
Six years I've been driving out to that house. Six years of thinking I was hired by a rich man who liked his cameras working, and every invoice I sent went into a file with her name on it and a judge's name under it.
“You want to know the worst of it?” I ask him. “I was proud of that account. I told people. I said the name at a trade counter in Calder Ridge once, deliberately, to see the fella's face.”
By midday I've done nothing useful and I'm standing over the toolbag with everything out of it on the bench, because I remembered something and I couldn't sit down until I'd checked.
Three days ago she rode in my truck for the first time.
We ate at The Wren and her hands shook on the table and she counted the pattern in the vinyl until they stopped, one to seven, over and over, and then she went red about it and told me anyway.
That's the part I keep turning over. She was embarrassed and she told me anyway.
She apologized to the coffee cup, too, when she knocked it. She didn't apologize to me — she apologized to the cup.
“She apologized to a cup,” I say out loud, to nobody, and Bramwell's tail goes twice against the leg of the bench.
On the way out she leaned into the cab and put her hand in the side pocket of my bag. I thought she was steadying herself.
There's an envelope in there. Plain, folded once, jammed down under the spare fuses.
One face has a stair section drawn freehand, so clean it could've been machined, with numbers running down the margin in that flat carpenter's pencil I gave her.
The other face is a column of times in pencil.
Times and single words. Lights. Door. Voice.
Door again. Two columns, and the second column's the same times a week later, and they match to the minute.
She was working. The whole time I sat across that table being helpful and buying her a sandwich she didn't eat, she was working, and she had this folded in her pocket the entire hour.
She put it in my bag instead of telling me. Saying it out loud in a room with other people in it was a thing she couldn't do yet, so she found a way to say it that used her hands.
I know the exact second she decided, too.
She was turning her wrists over on the tabletop, looking at them like they belonged to somebody careless, and then she stopped and went still and asked me what time I opened the shop.
That was it. That was her deciding, and I sat there and thought we were talking about opening hours.
I stand there with it in both hands and say it to the empty shop, because somebody ought to hear it.
“Okay. So you're not resting. Okay.”
The county building's forty minutes if you take Fernhollow Road slow, and I take it slow, because Bramwell hates the corners and because I want to arrive as a man who's here about an invoice.
That's the trick with counters. You go in with your ordinary face on. I've got a good ordinary face. Dirty hands, bad haircut I did myself with the kitchen scissors, a scar through my right eyebrow that makes people assume I fell off something, which I did.
The clerk's about sixty and has the look of a woman who has explained the same four things every day since spring.
“I'm after a petition file,” I say. “I've got a number off a court order and I don't know if I'm reading it right, so you'll have to be patient with me while I say it badly.”
She takes the sleeve, reads it upside down, and types with two fingers and total accuracy.
“That one's public. You could have phoned and saved yourself the drive,” she says, and slides a gray folder across at me without once looking at my hands.
“I'd have missed the scenery on Fernhollow Road,” I say. “There's a bend up there I've been meaning to have a serious talk with.”
She almost smiles at that, and points me at the machine in the corner, and tells me copies are ten cents a page and the thing eats quarters, which she keeps telling them about and nobody keeps fixing.
Nothing about me looks like a problem. That's the part I'll think about later, lying awake. A man in work boots asks for a file about somebody else's wife and the building just hands it over, because he's got dirt under his nails and a dog in the truck.
I feed it quarters. The sheets come out warm, and I press the first one flat against the inside of my wrist, and the warmth of it goes through me like a live wire found in a wall where no wire should be.
The petition's short. It reads like a favour between polite people. Concerns regarding capacity. A recommendation for continuity of care and monitoring at the residence. The petitioner is Julian Vance and the protected person is his wife, and the filing stamp is at the top in a purple box.
Sixth of June.
Out in the lot the sun's low and orange and coming in flat under the visor. Four o'clock, near enough. Bramwell's up on the bench seat with his nose on the passenger glass, fogging one circle and clearing it and fogging it again.
I reach past him into the door pocket for the job book. Carbons of every work order I've written, in order, going back years, because the taxman is worse than any judge.
I find the crash week. I find the call-out I did the morning after — the gate camera that stopped reporting, the one I drove out at seven to look at while a woman I'd never met was in a hospital in Calder Ridge with nineteen days about to go missing out of her head.
Eleventh of June.
I set the two sheets side by side on the steering wheel.
Sixth of June. Eleventh of June.
I count it on my fingers, which is not something I'd like witnessed. Seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth, eleventh. Five. I do it again from the other end because I don't trust myself with numbers and I get five again.
“You don't file to protect somebody from a car crash five days before the car crash,” I say.
Bramwell's ear comes up.
The paperwork came first. Somebody sat in an office in a good chair and wrote down that she couldn't be trusted with her own days, and got a judge to agree, and hired me — hired me, in June, in advance — and then, five days later, a car went off Route 12 and made all of it true.
My hands are shaking, which is embarrassing, and there's nothing in this truck I can tighten.
I want to drive out there. That's the whole of my body, all at once, pointed up Fernhollow Road with the engine already turning over in my head.
Twenty-two minutes and I'd be at that gate with this paper in my fist and she'd come down the steps and I'd finally get to say something true out loud to a person who blinks.
And then she'd have to explain, afterward, why the alarm man came screaming up the drive on a Friday afternoon.
Everything I do out there costs her more than it costs me. That's the arithmetic I actually understand.
So I ring the gatehouse line instead, which is the coward's version, and it connects before the first ring finishes.
A woman's voice arrives in the cab with us, warm and unhurried and pleasant as a hand on your arm.
“Ardenwood. There's nobody available to take that just now.”
Bramwell's head comes round at the sound of her.
I hang up. My thumb's over the button for a while after.
Then I do the only things there are to do. One copy goes in the door pocket, folded twice, under the flashlight where it'll live now. The second goes in the envelope for the shop safe tonight, behind the cash tin, and stays there.
And then I take the job book and write myself a work order for Ardenwood, dated two weeks out.
Annual check on the gatehouse panel. Nothing anybody could argue with.
A reason to drive up that road that exists on paper before I need it, because I'm slow, but I'm learning how these people work, and these people work in advance.
I put the pen down.
I've fixed nothing today. Nothing's sharpened, nothing's soldered, there's a hinge in a woman's kitchen door and that's my whole contribution to the world.
The sun's on the dash. The lot's emptying out behind me, one car at a time, people going home to houses that open when they push them.
“Bram,” I say, “the paperwork's older than the accident.”
He puts his chin back on my leg like that's my problem, and he's right, and I sit in a county parking lot with the engine off, working out how you tell a woman that somebody made a plan for her and then the road agreed with it.