§1 — Hook
The Subaru's odometer turned over to one-eighty-seven thousand on the bridge into Cedar Falls. I noticed it because I had been watching the dashboard and not the road for the last quarter mile, which is the kind of thing you do when you have driven five hours alone and the last twenty minutes of the drive is a place you have not seen in fourteen years.
The bridge looked the same. The bridge always looks the same. Cedar Falls is the kind of town where the bridge railing gets repainted in the same shade of green every other June, by the same crew, who are mostly the same men, who are mostly someone's cousin. I had forgotten this until the green came up under my windshield. Then I had forgotten that I had forgotten it.
The town sign came up on my right. Welcome to Cedar Falls. Population 3,217. I had left when the sign said three thousand four hundred and something. Three thousand four hundred and eleven, maybe. The number had come down. I did not know what to do with the noticing of that.
I drove down Main Street with both hands on the wheel and a coffee from a gas station in New Hampshire going cold in the cup holder. The diner was still on the corner. The diner had a new awning — the old one had been blue, and the new one was also blue, but a different blue, and the difference between the two blues was the kind of thing only a person who had been gone fourteen years would catalog. I cataloged it. I kept driving.
The hardware store was where it had been. The bookstore-post-office was where it had been. The Methodist church bells were on the hour as I came around the curve onto Maple, which meant it was four o'clock, which meant it had taken me, door to door, exactly five hours and seventeen minutes from Boston to here, which was how long it always took, which was a thing I had also forgotten I knew.
The Halloran house was two blocks up Maple, on the harbor side. I knew it before I saw it because the cedar shake on the south side had a particular run of weathering that was visible from the corner, and I knew that run of weathering from when I was seven and my father had pointed at it and said that's where the wind comes off the water.
I parked at the curb. I did not get out for a minute. I sat with my hands at ten and two and looked at the house and tried to feel what I had thought I would feel, which was nothing in particular, which was the whole point of having driven up here in the first place. Six weeks. Sell the house, settle the estate, sign the Boston contract, go back. I had said it to myself in those exact words, in that exact order, all the way up I-95.
The porch was missing half its rail.
The porch had not been missing half its rail in any of the photographs the estate attorney had sent me. The estate attorney had sent me photographs from May. It was October now. Last winter's nor'easter had taken the rail, evidently, between then and now, and nobody had told me, because there had been nobody to tell me, because I was the one the telling came up to.
I got out of the car.
§2 — Build
There was a toolbox on the porch.
I noticed the toolbox before I noticed the man. The toolbox was metal and red, the kind that opens like a tackle box, with a handle worn smooth on the underside the way handles get when one set of hands has carried them for thirty years. The toolbox sat on the second step from the top, square in the middle, like someone had set it down there to come back to it.
The man was kneeling at the far end of the porch with his back to the street. He had a hand sander in one hand and a respirator pushed up onto his forehead and a flannel shirt that was either gray or a blue that had been washed past the point of being blue. He was working on the splintered end of the rail where the storm had taken it. He was working slowly. He was working like someone who had done this work before and was not in any hurry to be done with it.
I came up the walk. The walk was crushed shell — local, from the marina — and it crunched under my shoes the way it had crunched when I was eight and ten and twenty-two. The man at the end of the porch did not turn around. He had heard me. I could see him decide not to turn around. He finished the stroke he was in. Then he set the sander down. Then he stood up.
He turned.
I did not, at first, recognize him. He was tall in the way some men get tall in their twenties — not all at once but as if the height arrived in a series of small additions over a decade. He had brown hair that needed cutting and a face that was, the way some faces are, the face of someone who had grown into it slowly. He was looking at me with a kind of waiting in his eyes that I had not, in fourteen years of city men, encountered.
He said: "Jess."
He said my name like a person saying a name he had been holding for a while.
I said: "I'm sorry — "
He said: "Ryan. Ryan Mercer. From the south side. My dad — "
I had it then. I had it the way you have a song you have not heard since you were thirteen — all at once, in full, with the lyrics. Ryan Mercer. Bobby Mercer's boy. Two grades behind me at the consolidated school. The kid who had broken his arm jumping off the dock the summer I turned sixteen. The kid I had not, by definition, seen in fourteen years, because Ryan Mercer at thirteen had been one person and Ryan Mercer at thirty-one was another, and the bridge between them was the bridge I had not crossed.
"Ryan," I said. "Right. Right, yes, of course."
"I'm sorry to be on your porch."
"It's not — "
"I know how it looks."
"It looks like someone is sanding my porch rail."
He almost smiled. It was a half-thing, a quarter-thing, the kind of expression that a person who lives in a small town and works with his hands is allowed to give a person who is doing them a small allowance.
"I am sanding your porch rail," he said.
"Why."
He looked at the toolbox on the step between us. He looked at the toolbox a long second. Then he said, in a voice that was even and unhurried and not, anywhere, performative:
"My dad was hired to do this porch in the spring of twenty-twenty-two. He took the deposit. He did the south side. He started the rail. Then he died, and I — I kept the toolbox on the porch."
§3 — Twist
I sat down on the top step.
I do not, as a rule, sit on porches. I had not, as a rule, sat on this porch since I was twenty-two. There is a way the nineteen-oh-eight cedar tongue-and-groove of a porch step takes a body, and I had forgotten it, and now I had remembered it, and there was nothing to be done about either thing.
Ryan stayed standing. He put his hands in the back pockets of his jeans the way men in this town put their hands in the back pockets of their jeans when they are trying to take up less room.
"I'm sorry about your dad," I said. "I didn't — "
"Four years ago. October."
"Oh."
"Yeah."
The wind was coming off the harbor. I could smell the marina from where I was sitting — diesel and salt and the particular kind of cold that comes off Maine water in October, which is not the same cold as the cold that comes off it in any other month. I had forgotten the smell of October marina. I had forgotten how complete the forgetting had been.
"My father," I said. "He hired your dad."
"Yes."
"In twenty-twenty-two."
"In the spring. He was — your dad was getting the house ready to — " Ryan stopped. He did not, I noticed, say getting the house ready for you to come back. He chose the not-saying. He said: "He was getting the house ready."
I looked at the toolbox. The toolbox had a name painted on the lid in white block letters that had faded to a kind of cream. MERCER. No first name. The way a man paints his name on a toolbox he expects to be passed down.
"Did he pay your father the rest?" I said.
"He paid the deposit. He didn't make it to the rest of it."
"How much was the rest."
"It's not — Jess, no."
"How much."
"I'm not — I'm not here for that. I'm here because the toolbox has been on this porch for four years and I'm finishing it. There's no rest to pay. The deposit covered the rail."
"Ryan."
"It covered the rail," he said again, and the way he said it was the way a person says a sentence they have rehearsed standing in their own kitchen at six in the morning, deciding which version of it they will say if the moment comes.
I turned my head and looked out at the street. The street was empty. Maple Street is always empty at four in the afternoon in October, because Cedar Falls is the kind of town where four in the afternoon is the part of the day between when school lets out and when the diner gets the dinner crowd, and there is, in that hour, a particular kind of quiet that holds the street the way a hand holds a cup.
I had forgotten the quiet.
I had not, until that moment of sitting on the step with a man I half-remembered and a toolbox between us, registered how hard a thing it had been to forget.
§4 — Cliffhanger
"I'm selling the house," I said.
I said it without looking at him. I said it to the empty street and the half-rail and the cedar shake that the wind had weathered the way the wind weathered it.
Ryan was quiet.
"In six weeks," I said. "I came up to settle the estate. The realtor needs the porch to pass inspection. That's what I came back for. To do that, and to sign — " I stopped. I did not need to tell Ryan Mercer about the half-title contract in Boston. Ryan Mercer was a man on my porch with a sander. "To do that, and then to go back."
"Okay."
"You don't have to — I'll pay for the rail. I'll find someone."
"Jess."
"What."
"It's already paid for."
"You said the deposit covered the rail."
"Right."
"The deposit was four years ago."
"Yes."
"And nobody — your father is gone, and the contract is — "
"Jess." His voice was very quiet now. "It's the porch on a house I've worked on for four years. It's not — it's not a thing I'm doing for money. I'm finishing it. I would have finished it whether you came back or not. The rail was going to be done by Thanksgiving."
I looked at him. I looked at him for what I think was the first time, properly, since I had walked up the path. He had the kind of face that does not, in fourteen years, change in the way a face in a city changes. He had the face he had had at thirteen, only longer, only weathered, only with the four years of not-having-his-father painted into the skin around his eyes.
I said: "I came back to leave."
I said it because I had been saying it to myself, in those exact five words, the whole drive up. I said it because I needed Ryan Mercer to know what shape this was — the shape of it being a temporary thing, a logistical thing, a six-week thing. I said it because I needed the shape to be in the air between us before any other shape could get in there first.
Ryan looked at me a long second.
He did not, then, answer.
He did not say okay. He did not say I figured. He did not say any of the things he could have said, including the ones a man in a small town is supposed to say to a woman who has just stated the terms of her staying.
He bent down. He picked up the sander. He turned back to the rail.
He said, over his shoulder, in the same even voice:
"Light's good for another hour."
And he started sanding again.
The church bells across the square were on the half-hour. The wind off the harbor moved a single cedar shake on the south side of the house — I heard it shift, a small wooden sigh — and the kind of quiet that came after was the kind of quiet I had spent fourteen years in cities trying not to hear.
He had not answered me.
The not-answering was sitting on the step between us, between the toolbox and the empty walk and the four o'clock shadow that was just starting to come down off the church steeple onto the lawn.
I sat on the step and listened to the sander.
I had no idea, sitting there, what it meant that he had not answered.
I would not, for several weeks, know.
— to be continued in Ep2