Chapter 11 Everything given, nothing asked
Her boots were by the door, and somebody had cleaned them.
Maeve stood on the landing over the shop in yesterday’s shirt with her hair still wet and looked at them for a while.
Not polished. Nobody in Coldwater polished anything.
Just knocked out and gone over with a wire brush, the grey grade dust worked out of the welt where it had been since the Saturday she walked the yard fence with Torch, and the laces pulled out and put back in even.
She had left them in the middle of the floor. She remembered leaving them in the middle of the floor, because she had been too tired to care where they went and had liked that about herself.
Across the landing Vault’s door was already open on an empty room. It was twenty past six.
Nine days since the dress.
The stairs came down into the back of the shop, and the shop smelled the way it always did at that hour — cold concrete, last night’s oil, the hot-tin smell off the space heater nobody turned off.
Her jacket was on the hook by the parts shelf.
Danny’s jacket, really, still, though nobody had said anything about her giving it back. It had been brushed.
She got halfway across the bay before she understood that she was looking for something to carry.
There was nothing. The gate had been unchained.
The kettle was on. The trash drum by the roll-up, which she had been emptying since Wednesday because somebody had to and because it was four steps from the door, had been emptied, and the liner was in it square, and a new roll of liners sat on the shelf above it where there had not been one on Friday.
“Morning,” said the man on the bench by the roll-up.
She did not know his name. He was somewhere north of fifty, with a paperback folded back on itself in one hand and a thermos between his boots, and he had been on that bench when she came down yesterday too.
“Morning,” Maeve said.
He went back to the paperback. He was not watching her. That was the thing she kept trying to explain to herself and could not, even inside her own head: not one of them watched her. They were simply there, at the four steps of every day where a person might have had to do something.
She walked to the Ember and a bike came down Main about thirty seconds behind her and turned off at the drugstore and never came back out.
Marla had the urn going and the blind up and a carbon book open on the register, and she did not say good morning, which was Marla’s way of saying it.
The counter ran to two. Maeve was good at the counter now, in the way you are good at a thing after a week of doing it badly in front of people who watched you do it.
She could carry four plates. She had stopped calling out the tickets in the wrong order.
Her hands had gone from soft to sore to something in between that she was quietly, stupidly proud of.
There was a split across the pad of her right thumb from the dish sink.
She kept finding it with her other thumb and pressing on it, on purpose, all morning.
At ten she went to the pay phone on the wall by the restrooms with two quarters and dialled her mother’s house and let it ring until it stopped.
She had used her own phone that first Monday, four times, the last of them from the alley with her hands still wet.
It was up in the room over the shop now with the charge in it and the plan Everett paid for still live on it, and she was not going to reach her own mother down a line he got the bill for and could read off a statement at the end of the month.
The two quarters were tips out of her own apron, and that was the whole of the difference, and she knew exactly how small it was.
One other thing came over the pass that morning and she did not recognize it for what it was.
Two men in feed caps at the end of the counter, talking about somebody’s hay, and one of them said that the Bidwells had not lost the deposit on that hall after all, they had only had it moved, and the other one said Janice Roddy will be pleased with herself in the voice men use for women they have known forty years.
Then they went back to the eggs. Maeve wiped down the far end and filed it where she filed everything out of Verlon that week, which was nowhere at all.
At twenty past ten, Torch came in.
He came in the way he came into everywhere, sideways through the door and already talking, black hair shoved back and going straight back down over one eye, and he had two coffees he did not need because the Ember had coffee.
“There she is.” He put one of the cups in front of her on the counter like he was dealing a card. “You called Verlon.”
Maeve put the rag down.
“I called my mother.”
“Yeah, no, I know.” He was grinning. It was the worst part.
“Listen, that’s — I mean, do what the hell you want, obviously.
Only if it goes the other way, if it’s them calling, that comes to me now, right?
So you don’t have to stand there with a phone in your hand and no idea who’s on it.
You never have to do that again. That’s done. ”
“Torch.”
“I’ve got the number.” He tapped his jacket pocket. “It’s on my phone. It rings at me.” He said it the way a man tells you he has paid for dinner.
Down the counter, Marla turned a page of the carbon book with one finger and did not look up, and that was how Maeve learned who had made the call that brought him.
Not out of anything. Marla would have said the same three words to anybody who asked her a straight question.
That was Marla. That was the whole town.
“How did you know I called,” Maeve said.
Torch’s grin came off exactly as far as it took to make room for the answer, and what was underneath it was warm and clean and absolutely certain.
“Because we’ve got you,” he said. “That’s all that is. That’s all any of it is.”
He drank the coffee he had brought her and went out through the door backwards, telling her something about a carburetor, and the bell over the door went, and the room got quiet after him.
Maeve stood with the rag in her hand.
She could not find the sentence. That was the thing.
She turned it over — my phone, my mother, my Tuesday, my name — and every single piece of it came back to her with a man’s kindness stuck to it like tape, and there was no way to pull one off and hold it up without being the woman who did that.
Say it out loud and it was: you answered my telephone.
It was: you cleaned my boots. It was: you emptied a bin.
She washed the tops of the tables that did not need it.
Danny came at half past twelve.
He came in through the front like a customer, which he wasn’t, and stood at the end of the lunch counter with his hands nowhere, and Maeve saw the envelope before she saw his face.
It was the Ember’s envelope. Brown, the flap folded not licked, MAEVE in Marla’s square pencil capitals across the front of it. Marla paid cash on a Monday out of the register drawer, and had done since the foundry.
“Marla said to bring you this,” Danny said.
“Marla’s four feet away.”
“I know.” He said it to the napkin dispenser.
Twenty-four years old and patched about five minutes, with a thumbnail split black to the quick and a rag hanging out of his back pocket.
“Torch had me collect it this morning. For the — so it’s not sitting in the drawer with your name on it.
Because of the — the paper. Down in Ellery. ”
“You collected my wages.”
“Yeah.”
“From four feet away.”
“Yeah,” Danny said, to the counter.
He put the envelope down on the formica and pushed it across with two fingers and did not let go of it for a second longer than a man needs to.
Then he said, still to the counter, to nobody, before she had asked him anything at all:
“I’d have wanted somebody to ask me first.”
The fryer went on through the wall. A truck came up Main in second gear.
“Danny.”
“That’s not — I’m not saying anybody did anything.
” He got his eyes up as far as her collar and no further.
“Torch is right. Vault’s right. It’s a good plan, it’s — it’s how you do it, it’s how I’d do it.
” He stopped. His jaw worked. “Only I’ve been the one going to get the envelope for five years.
That’s all. Five years of going and getting a thing that was about somebody else and handing it over to them after.
” He shrugged, badly, like the jacket did not fit, though it did now.
“It’s different when you’re the one it’s about.
That’s all I’m saying. I don’t know how to say it any better than that. ”
He went out fast, and the bell over the door had not finished when Marla said, from the register, without looking:
“They took your Tuesday.”
Maeve turned around.
“What?”
“Close-out. Tomorrow.” Marla licked her thumb and turned the carbon.
“Fella came by Saturday night and squared it with me. Said with everything that’s going on it’s no good you being on Main Street at eleven at night with the street empty, and could I move it to a day shift, and I said I’d already got the day covered, and he said not to worry about it.
” She shut the book. “So it’s the Friday only. Sixteen dollars less.”
“Which fella?”
“Big one. Hands.” Marla’s eyes came up. “I didn’t agree to it, before you go thinking I did.
He wasn’t asking me. He was telling me a thing that had already happened, nice as you like, and I stood here and let him, which is a thing I’ll be thinking about.
” A pause. “Nobody asked me either, is what I’m saying to you. You can have that for what it’s worth.”
It was worth more than anything anybody had said to her since Saturday.
That was the trouble with it. Maeve stood there holding a brown envelope with her own money in it that she had not been allowed to walk twelve feet to collect, and the one person in this town who would say the words out loud was a woman with a register and no vote in anything.
“Thanks,” she said.
“Don’t,” said Marla.
The shift let her go at the back of the afternoon, and she walked up past the Spoke at four because it was the long way home and she wanted the long way home.
The screen door was propped on its beer crate.
The swamp cooler hung off the south wall the way it had hung off the south wall since the seventies.
On Saturday morning it had been rattling itself apart with a slipped belt and a housing plate held on by two screws out of four.
Maeve had gotten up on a milk crate with a flat-blade screwdriver out of Ma’s drawer and two pieces of baling wire.
She had gotten the belt seated and wired the plate flat, and it had run quiet all afternoon.
She had gone back out twice to listen to it.
Once with a beer in her hand. It was the only thing she had made happen in her own life in three years, and she had known that while she was standing on the crate, and had not minded knowing it.
The plate was off the ground and level and held on with four new machine screws, sunk square, with washers. The belt was new. The whole unit had been re-hung an inch higher on a bracket somebody had cut and welded and painted, and it was running, and you could not hear it at all.
Her wire was in the drum by the door with the bottle caps.
Maeve stood in the gravel in the flat four o’clock sun and looked at a piece of work that was better than hers in every way a piece of work can be better.
Done by a man with a chair at that table and twenty years of hands, who had walked past it, seen a woman’s patch job, and put it right the way you put a thing right for somebody you have decided to take care of.
There was not one single thing wrong with it.
She got back to the yard at five. The sun was off the ridge and the grade was going blue and the gate was open, because the gate was always open now, because somebody opened it.
Fed. Warm. Safe. Her boots clean, her bin emptied, her wages fetched, her phone answered, her gate opened, her cooler fixed, her Tuesday gone.
Nine days ago she had cut herself out of the back of a dress with a cake knife because a whole town had arranged her life for her and been so pleased about it.
She had gotten on the back of a stranger’s bike in front of twelve people and thought, with the wind going straight through the back of the dress she had cut open, there.
Now nobody knows what happens next, including me.
She stood in the shop yard with an envelope in her jacket pocket and worked out that she could not name one thing in the whole of the day that she had decided.
Down the pass, a long way off, a flatbed came off the grade with its jake brake going, and the sound of it came up the valley ahead of it, and for a second it was him.
Then it went on through town and away west without slowing, and it was somebody else, and there were three hours of the evening left to stand in.
Maeve found that her chest had gone tight and her eyes had gone hot.
She did not have the first idea how to explain any of this to him in a way that would not sound like she was complaining about being loved.