What He Left Behind

There were four cottages at the bottom of Quarry Street and three widows in them. The Works had put them up in 1961 for the families of men it had killed. Four squat brick boxes, the same roofline, the same crooked concrete stoop, the same six feet of yard before the fence. The town had been saying Widow's Row so long that the county printed it that way on the tax paper. Cottage one was an old woman forty years at it, with flowerbeds cut back for winter in straight lines you could have run a string along. Cottage two kept her blinds down. Cottage four had been boarded since 2011 and had a pine coming up through the front step, waist high now, that nobody was going to pull.

Thandi had the third one. On the first Sunday in October she was out behind it in the wet with a splitting maul, because she had half an hour before he came and she wanted to be doing something when he got here.

The rain wasn't falling so much as standing in the air. It had been at it since Friday. Up on the ridge the Works held the last of the light the way it always did, sixty acres of dead brick still burning dull orange a full hour after the streets down here had gone the color of a nickel. She set a round of lodgepole on the block, read the grain, and put the maul through it on the first swing. Then the halves. Then the quarters. Her shoulders liked it. Eight years of running bead with a hood down and a wire feed in her hand had built her for exactly this and for very little else. Something in her went quiet when she was breaking a thing along the line it already wanted to break.

Thirty-four years old, tall and long-boned and wide across the back, sleeves shoved up past the elbow in weather like this because she ran hot when she worked. Dark brown, deep and even, the same in October as in July, the same in this yard in the rain as under the work lights over the pass. Nothing in this county had ever changed the color of her. Nobody in it had ever managed to mention it without sounding pleased with themselves for noticing. A shiny puckered burn the size of a thumbprint on the inside of her right forearm, off a bead she had been too stubborn to stop for in her second year. Her hands were her father's. Everything else was the work.

She had the maul up for the next one when she heard the truck.

Not a bike. Nobody rode Quarry in October rain if they had a knee, and he had a knee. The truck came down off the top of the street in second gear, past the Sanctuary and the gravel lot and the whole length of the hill. She knew the sound of it the way she knew the compressor at the shop and the furnace under her own floor. Eleven years of knowing it. It slowed at the bottom, turned in, and stopped at her fence with the wipers going.

Thandi put the maul head-down against the block and didn't go to meet him.

Mordecai Lowndes came up out of it all of a piece, the way he did everything, one part at a time. Forty-one years old and built like something you'd need a chain and a come-along to move. Chest and shoulders off twenty years of lifting what didn't want lifting. A gut he had quit apologizing for around thirty-five. Gray-brown hair buzzed down to nothing under the rain, and a beard gone mostly gray at the chin. Pale, the way three generations of foundry Cornish were pale — he went red at the neck instead of brown, and he was red now, from the cold. The left knee took his weight badly. It always did in October, and worse in the wet, and he didn't make a face about it, which was its own kind of announcement.

He had a paper sack in one hand.

"Thandi."

"Mordecai."

He came around the fence and stood in her yard, six feet off. He looked at the four rounds she'd split and the forty-odd she hadn't — bucked to length in August, stacked along the fence since, waiting on her shoulders half an hour at a time. He didn't say anything about them. That was the thing about him — he could stand in your yard for a full minute without putting one word in it, and by the end of the minute you'd have said three you didn't mean to.

She got there in twenty seconds. "What's in the sack."

"Belt for your blower."

"My blower has a belt."

"Your blower has a belt with a crack in it about two inches long." He said it to the wall of the cottage, not to her. "Heard it Wednesday when I come by for the filter. It'll go the first week it gets down to zero and the house'll be cold and I'll be over here anyway with the same part in my hand." A pause. "Four dollars."

"It was six."

"It was four."

She wiped rain off her forehead with the back of her wrist. He had bought a blower belt. Nobody had asked him to buy a blower belt. Nobody had asked him to hear a crack in a belt from the top of the crawlspace stairs on a Wednesday, either, and here was the sack.

"Well," she said. "You're wet. Come in before you rust."

The kitchen was the warmest room in the cottage and smelled like Sunday — onions and the last of the coffee and the paraffin off the space heater she ran in the corner when the furnace was cycling low. There was a comb, a spray bottle and a jar of grease set out at the end of the table where they'd been since noon, waiting for tonight. She did her own twists at that table every Sunday, had since before she was married, and she wasn't about to start paying a woman in Ellery twenty-five dollars to do something her own hands did fine.

Mordecai took his boots off at the door without being told and went down the hatch into the crawlspace with a work light. She stood at the top of the stairs with her arms folded and listened to him get down there on that knee, one stair at a time, breathing through it.

"Belt's got a spot on the inside face too," she said down into the dark. "Started to gum. Pulley's throwing dust."

"Yep."

"That's the idler, not the belt."

There was a silence with a wrench in it. "That's the idler," he agreed.

"So the belt's four dollars and the bearing's twenty-two, and if you put a new belt on a bad bearing you've bought yourself the pleasure of doing this again in February."

"I'll bring the bearing."

"You'll bring me the part," Thandi said, "and I will put it in, because that is a press fit and you are down there working off a knee that doesn't bend, and I have a shop press sixty-one miles away that I have keys to."

She heard him stop. Then the ratchet started again, and he said, from under her floor, in a voice with absolutely nothing in it, "All right."

That was how they argued. They had been arguing that way for two years and eight months and neither of them had ever raised their voice, because the argument had never been about a furnace.

He came up filthy. She had a rag ready and he took it, and the taking was the same as everything else — no thanks, no ceremony, his hand and her hand and about four inches between them and then not. He was very careful about the four inches. He had always been very careful about them, and she had noticed the care, and noticing it was a thing she didn't let herself do for very long at a stretch.

Then he set the envelope on the table by the sugar tin.

Plain white, folded once. Two hundred dollars out of Vault's column, voted at the round table the week after the funeral and backdated to the Sunday after he went off the road. Paid every Sunday since. Whether she was home or not, whether she spoke to him or not, whether it was Christmas or the anniversary or a Sunday in October with the rain standing in the air.

Thandi looked at it. She didn't put her hand out.

"That's a hundred and thirty-eight," she said.

"I know what it is."

"Twenty-seven thousand six hundred dollars, Mordecai."

"I know what it is."

"Do you know where it is?"

He looked at the closet door off the kitchen, where the water heater stood with a bread bag on top of it, and the bread bag was fat and squared off with envelopes and had been for a long time.

"Yes," he said.

"Then you know I have never cashed one dollar of it, and you know I am not going to, and you keep bringing it, and I keep not saying anything about it, and every Sunday it gets one envelope harder to say." She kept her voice flat. She was good at flat. "So say something about it. You first."

He stood in her kitchen in his socks with a rag in his fist and rain still coming off the ends of his beard, and she watched him try. He got as far as opening his mouth.

"Table voted it," he said.

"That's not a thing about it. That's a receipt."

"It's what there is." He folded the rag once and put it down on the counter, like it mattered where it lay. "I'll tell Deacon you don't want it, you want me to. Won't stop him. He'll just send it with somebody else."

"I don't want somebody else. I want—" and she stopped, because the end of that sentence was a cliff, and she was thirty-four years old and had a child in the back room and hadn't been stupid in a long time. She started it over somewhere safer. "I want to know what I am. That's all I've ever wanted to know."

"You're Kick's wife," Mordecai said.

"Kick's been dead getting on for three years."

"Yeah." He looked at the floor between them. "I noticed."

The screen door banged, the way it did every time the wind came up off Main, because the latch had been shot since August and the strike plate was out of true. It banged twice while they stood there. On the second one he turned his head toward it. She watched him measure the gap with his eyes the way he'd measured the belt, and she said, before he could get a word out of his mouth, "Leave it."

"It's a ten-minute—"

"Leave it." Then, quieter, because that had come out with an edge she hadn't meant to hand him: "I'll do it. I've got a file and I've got a drill. I can fix my own door."

"Never said you couldn't."

"You never say anything," Thandi said. "That's the whole trouble with you."

Out the window over the sink, past the clothesline, the shape under the tarp sat where it had sat since the second week of that February. Kick's bike, up on a stand behind the cottage under two layers of blue poly, a truck tire holding down the bottom edge. She hadn't taken the tarp off. He hadn't offered to. It was the one thing in the yard neither of them would touch, and it had been out there so long the grass had gone yellow in the shape of it.

Amara hadn't come out of her room the whole time.

She never did. Thandi had stopped calling her, the way you stop testing a switch you already know is dead. So when the bedroom door opened at the end of the hall, Thandi felt it in her spine before she heard the footsteps.

Nine years old and small for it, all of her father's straight black hair coming loose out of two days' braids, her mother's face on her and her mother's way of standing in a doorway with her weight back. She had the notebook against her chest. She had it against her chest most of the time now. Ruled, dated, a fresh line for every single thing anybody had ever told her her father said, and God help the adult who got the wording wrong in front of her. She had started it at six, while he was still alive. The first pages were not reported at all. They were things she had heard the man say herself, put down the same day, in enormous careful letters, with the date already in the margin.

"Amara," Thandi said. "You want to say hello."

"No." The girl didn't look at her. She looked at Mordecai, straight on, the way children do before somebody trains it out of them. "Mr. Lowndes."

"Amara."

"Was my dad going too fast?"

The kitchen got extremely quiet. The rain went on ticking in the gutter over the door. Thandi opened her mouth and nothing useful came out of it. She had never asked that question in those words, in nine hundred and some days. Her daughter had walked up the hall and asked it standing in a doorway in socks.

Mordecai Lowndes took a breath. Not a big one.

"No," he said. "It was ice."

Amara looked at him for a second longer. Then she sat down at the kitchen table, opened the notebook flat, ran her thumb down the page to the first clear line, and wrote it out. Thandi watched her put the date in the margin first, the way she'd been taught to on a work order and had somehow taught herself. October fifth. Mr. Lowndes says it was ice.

And Thandi stood there with her back against the counter and her arms folded and the envelope untouched by the sugar tin, and looked at a man she had known for eleven years. A man she had watched carry her husband's casket with the whole weight of the front left corner on him because his knee wouldn't take the step down. A man who had been in her crawlspace on a Wednesday for a filter nobody asked him to change. And she knew, the way she knew a bad bead through a hood at four inches, that something in that sentence was not true.

She just couldn't tell which part.

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

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