His Name on It

She left Ellery at ten past six with the heater roaring and the wipers on the slow setting. By the time the road climbed out of the flats and into the pass, the rain had turned into the kind that doesn't fall so much as hang. Sixty-one miles. An hour if the grade was dry and the elk stayed off it. Willa drove it the way she drove everything now, both hands on the wheel and the clock in the corner of her eye. She didn't look at the seat beside her, where the folder was.

The town came up out of the valley the way it always had, all at once and lower than it had any business being. Main Street with half its windows papered. The water tower. The Works up on the ridge above everything, rusted the color of a scab, still catching whatever light there was an hour after the streets had gone gray. She'd been coming in past that water tower six days a week since the end of August. She'd never gone further into Coldwater than her mother's back bedroom. Down Main, left at the bottom of Quarry, up Toole, and out again the same way in the dark. Not one turn off that line in seven weeks. Twelve years, and the rest of it hadn't had the decency to change.

The cemetery sat on the shoulder of the hill on the way up to the pass, behind a chain-link fence with a plank gate somebody kept painting white. She parked on the gravel apron and sat for a second with the engine off, listening to the rain tick on the roof, and did the arithmetic one last time.

Six hundred eighty for the opening and the closing. Two hundred for the box, which was the cheapest one they had and which she'd chosen without apologizing to anybody. Ninety for a tent she'd told them twice not to bother with. She had it in an envelope in the glovebox in twenties and fifties. Counted three times at her own kitchen table on Tuesday night with the apartment quiet around her. To the dollar, and not one dollar past it.

She got out. The cold went through her coat immediately, the wet mountain cold that gets into the seams. She put her chin down and walked in through the plank gate with the envelope in her fist.

She was wearing black pants and flat black shoes with a good sole on them. Twelve years of standing in other people's houses had stopped her owning shoes she couldn't stand up in. Her hair was through a band. Her hands were what they were. Short nails, cracked across the knuckles from the gloves and the sanitizer. A burn scar off a stove in a bungalow on Fifteenth Street in Ellery, got reaching past a woman who was falling. She hadn't put anything on her face. Willa Fenn was thirty-nine years old. She'd done the last month of nineteen people's lives for an agency wage, and then she'd done her mother's for nothing. She'd come to bury her in the clothes she could work in, because she had to be back in Ellery by four.

That was the shape of the day, and it wasn't negotiable, and it was nobody's business in this town.

The sexton was waiting under the eave of the little block shed with his hands in his coat. An old man with a jaw full of gray stubble and a cigarette he wasn't smoking. He knew her. Everybody up here knew her; that was the whole problem with the place.

"Willa."

"Mr. Sowder." She had the envelope half out. "Six eighty. And I told the funeral home no tent, so if they set one up anyway they can eat it."

"There's no tent."

"Good."

"There's no six eighty either." He said it flat, in the voice of a man who'd rather have got the thing out of the way before she arrived. He took a folded slip out of his breast pocket, and he held it a second longer than he needed to, and then he handed it over. "It's squared. Wednesday."

The rain had already spotted it before she got it open.

It was the county's own carbon form, the pink copy, soft as cloth. Line one, the plot. Line two, the opening and closing. Line three, the perpetual care that she hadn't budgeted for at all and had been going to fight about. And across the bottom, in the box, the amount and the date and a signature. All three of them in block capitals, printed hard enough to emboss the paper. The pen dragged straight through the middle of every seven with a small vicious cross-stroke.

Willa stood in the rain and looked at a seven.

She knew that hand. She'd known it at twenty-four, on a parts list. She'd known it at twenty-six on the back of a receipt from the Ember with a phone number on it. She'd carried that receipt in a coat pocket for four months like a girl. She'd thrown it in a truck stop trash can outside Ellery with her whole life packed in the back seat behind her.

"He was up here Wednesday," Sowder said. "Wanted to know if the ground was going to be a problem at the top end. It wasn't."

"You should have called me."

"He said not to."

"And that settled it."

The old man looked out at the rain. "It generally does," he said.

She folded the pink slip into quarters and put it in her pocket with the envelope. Then she went up the row to bury her mother with seven hundred seventy dollars she didn't need in her coat. Which is a stupid thing to be furious about at a graveside. She was furious about it. She carried it up the hill like a stone in her shoe.

Nine people came.

Merle Pratt from four doors down on Toole, in a suit that had been a good suit in about 1988. He was holding an umbrella over a woman from the church who wasn't his wife and didn't want it. Two more of the church women, both of whom had brought Ada Fenn a casserole in September and neither of whom had come inside. A man off the county road crew who'd worked with Willa's mother at the school kitchen for eleven years and who cried, which nobody expected, least of all him. A neighbor from the bottom of the street with her hands jammed in her pockets. Sherry Mabe off the register at the Ember, still in her apron under her coat, who'd shut the till for forty minutes to stand on a hill in the rain. Otis Beck, who'd been at school with Willa's father, with his hat off the whole time and the water running down into his collar for it. Loretta Hale, up from the corner where Toole ran into the bottom of Quarry. Iron-gray hair scraped back, reading glasses shoved up into it. Standing on the gravel path rather than the grass, because of the knee. Taking the whole thing in cover to cover, quick as a woman checking a till, and no verdict handed out.

And a man at the top end of the row, three graves back, standing still enough that the rain had stopped running off him and started collecting.

Willa had known he was there since she came through the gate. She'd known it the way you know there's a step down in a dark room in a house you grew up in.

Marcus Calloway had got taller, which wasn't possible. So he'd got thinner. The same long lean rangy length of him, pared down to what the work needed. Twenty years up on a bike in weather, and a man who doesn't eat because it's a Tuesday. Deep brown skin gone ashy with the cold across the knuckles. Close-cropped hair with gray coming in at the temples, and gray in the three days of beard, which was new and which she hated on sight because it suited him. Rain sitting in beads across the shoulders of the cut, the black leather dark with it. The patch on his back was turned away from her and legible anyway to every single person on that hill.

Forty-three. He'd been thirty-one the last time she stood in the same weather as him. He had a face that gave a person nothing to work with then, too, and she'd spent two years thinking that was a door she would eventually find the side of.

He didn't come down the row. He stayed where he was and he let them get on with it.

There was no minister. Ada had been clear about that the one time she was ever clear about anything, some Sunday years ago over the phone, and Willa had written it down. So the funeral home's man read the two paragraphs Willa had given him on a sheet of paper, and read them decently. Then the box went down on the straps. The rain went into the hole ahead of it. The clay at the edge was that orange the whole valley turned when you cut it.

Willa had washed this woman. Seven weeks ago, when the stroke took her right side, Willa had knelt on that bathroom floor on Toole Street and washed her mother's back. Her mother swore at her the whole time in a voice that had lost half its consonants. She hadn't cried then either. She stood at the edge of the hole with her hands folded and thought, absurdly, your hair's not done, Mama, and you'd have something to say about that.

Then it was over, the way they are, all at once and forty minutes early.

They came past her one at a time. Merle Pratt said she was a good girl to have come back, which wasn't what he thought and not what anybody thought. The church women said the thing about a mercy. The man from the road crew shook her hand with both of his and couldn't get any words out at all, and that was the only one that got anywhere near her.

Loretta stopped last. Her chin came up and her eyes went over Willa's face without hurry, and none of what she found in it came back out again.

"You're at the house."

"Three weeks," Willa said. "Then it goes on the market."

"Mm," Loretta said, and that was all, and she went down the gravel path to a Cherokee parked crooked at the fence.

And then there was nobody left on the hill. The sexton, waiting with a tractor he was too polite to start. Willa. And the man three graves back, who had finally begun to walk.

He stopped a proper distance off. Close enough to talk. Not close enough to be standing with her.

"Willa."

She'd thought, on the drive in, about all the things she would say if this happened. She had a list. She'd had a list for twelve years, and it turned out to be no use whatsoever, because he wasn't a man in a list. He was a man in the rain with water in the creases of his boots. He smelled like leather and cold and, faintly, like the oil that never entirely comes out of a person's hands.

"Ridge," she said.

"Sorry about Ada."

Three words. Nothing behind them she could get hold of and nothing false in them either, which was the trouble, which had always been the trouble.

She got the pink slip out of her pocket and held it out. It had gone limp.

"I had this," she said. "All of it. In cash, in the car, right now."

He looked at the paper. He didn't take it.

"I know how much a hole costs, Ridge. I have known how much a hole costs since I was twenty-two. I had it counted out on my own table." Her voice was doing something she didn't authorize. She stopped it. "You didn't ask me."

He didn't move. The rain came off the ends of his sleeves.

Say it, she thought. Say one true thing. It has been twelve years. There is a grave open eight feet from us. You could say I didn't want you paying for it alone, or you could say I'm sorry, or you could say the other one, the one you never said the whole time I was loading a car in front of your face.

"I've got hands for the house," he said.

She laughed. It came out wrong, one syllable, more of a breath.

"I don't need hands."

And he took that. That was the thing. He took it standing. No argument, no second pass, no are you sure. He inclined his head about an inch, and his mouth did something at one corner that wasn't a smile, and he said:

"Okay."

Then he stepped back off the path so she could get by him, because the ground was cut up and there was only the one dry line. He stood in the wet grass in his good boots to let her pass. She went down the hill with her hands shaking in her pockets.

His bike was at the fence. A Softail, parked square to the rail, front wheel cocked, nothing left to chance. Of course it was.

She sat in the car until she heard it start and heard it go down the grade toward town. Only then did she let her forehead come down onto the top of the wheel. A count of ten, no more.

Eleven words. She counted them somewhere past the second cattle guard, going down out of the pass with the wipers on the fast setting and Coldwater falling away behind her.

Willa. Sorry about Ada. I've got hands for the house. Okay.

Eleven words, and a hole he'd paid for, and a receipt he'd told a man not to call her about. Twelve years, and he could stand in the rain and decide a thing about her life and then not tell her he'd decided it. And there was nothing in it a person could even be properly angry at, because he'd been kind, and because her mother was in it.

The clock on the dash said 11:52.

She had to be in Ellery by four. There was one hour of road and three weeks of that house between here and it. And there was the other thing. The thing that had sat in her chest the whole time she stood at the edge of that hole with that man three graves back. The thing nobody on this hill knew and nobody in this town had ever been told.

Willa put both hands on the wheel and drove.

End of sample. The story continues in the full edition.

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