§1 — Hook
I was up at five-forty in a house that had not been heated through a winter in eighteen months. The radiators ticked. The radiators in the Halloran house had always ticked — copper steam pipes from nineteen-thirty-something, my grandmother's last big project — and the ticking had been part of the soundscape of every winter morning of my childhood, and I had forgotten that, too. The forgetting was becoming a list. I was writing it down at the kitchen table in a notebook I had bought at a Mobil station in Kennebunk because I had not, for fourteen years, kept paper notebooks.
By six the kitchen had the brown light that Maine kitchens get in October at six in the morning, which is the kind of light that decides whether a person is going to make coffee at home or walk down to the diner.
I walked down to the diner.
The walk down to the diner from Maple Street to the corner of Main is exactly four blocks. I had not walked it in fourteen years. It took me eight minutes. I had remembered it taking longer. I think I had remembered it taking longer because I had been ten the last time I had walked it on a Saturday morning by myself, and a ten-year-old's eight minutes is not the same as a thirty-six-year-old's.
The diner was full. Not full-full. Cedar Falls full — which is six or seven booths and the counter, half the seats taken, one waitress, the smell of bacon and coffee and whatever pie was setting under the glass dome on the counter for the day, which was, today, a blueberry, which meant Patrice had put it in the oven at four-thirty.
Patrice was at the register when I came in. Patrice — who had taught me fifth grade, who had waited tables on weekends for thirty-one years to keep her teaching salary going, who had not, in the time since I had last been in this diner, gotten one millimeter shorter or thinner or more or less Patrice. She looked up.
"Halloran," she said.
She said it the way she said the names of every fifth-grader she had ever taught — like it was a small fact she had been carrying around in her pocket that she was happy to take out and look at.
"Hi, Patrice," I said.
"Booth or counter."
"Booth."
She tilted her head at the booth across from the counter — the second one, the one by the window — and I went and sat down. The booth's vinyl had been re-done. The booth's vinyl had been the original red-and-cream when I was a kid, and now it was a navy-and-cream, and the difference between the two booths-of-memory was the kind of small detail I was finding I could not stop registering.
Patrice came over with a coffee already poured.
"Black with one Splenda," she said, and set it down.
"I haven't taken Splenda since two thousand and — "
"It's fine. I'll bring you sugar. I just remembered the Splenda."
She did. She brought me sugar and a small ceramic pitcher of cream and she did not ask if I wanted anything to eat because Patrice had decided, for me, that I was getting the eggs-and-toast that she gave to people who were too thin and looked like they had driven five hours the day before. The decision was being made for me. I did not, sitting in the booth at six-fifteen in the morning, mind it being made.
I drank my coffee. I looked at the counter.
Ryan Mercer was at the counter.
§2 — Build
Saturday standing seat. He had, of course, a Saturday standing seat. The third stool from the end. He was in the same flannel as yesterday — or the same color of flannel; the flannel was either the same or, Cedar Falls being Cedar Falls, the kind of garment a man owned three of. He had a coffee. He had a plate that had once held eggs. He was reading the local weekly paper, which was thin enough that he could fold it into a small rectangle and prop it against his coffee cup.
He had, when I walked in, not turned around. He had registered me — I had felt the registering — and chosen not to turn. The not-turning was, I was learning, a Ryan Mercer characteristic. The man had a particular fluency in not turning toward the thing he was registering.
I drank my coffee.
Patrice brought me eggs and toast and a small dish of strawberry jam that she had made herself, which she said as she set it down: I made the jam. She said it in the way a person announces a thing they have been waiting fourteen years to mention.
"Patrice," I said. "Thank you. For — "
"How long are you here for, Halloran."
"Six weeks."
She nodded. She tucked her order pad into her apron. She did not say anything for a moment. Then she said: "Six weeks is something."
She went back to the counter.
I ate. The eggs were good. The toast was good. The jam was, in fact, very good, and I had not, in fourteen years of Boston brunches, had jam that was made by a person I had once been graded by. I ate slowly. I did not, while eating, look at the counter.
About halfway through my plate I felt — not a turn, not a watching, but a sort of softening of the air on the counter side of the room — and I looked up.
Ryan had turned on the stool. He was facing my booth. He had a coffee cup in his hand. He was looking at me the way he had looked at me on the porch yesterday, which was a way I had been thinking about, against my better judgment, between the hours of one and three a.m. last night when the radiators had been ticking.
He said, across the room, in a voice that did not need to be loud because the diner was the diner and sound carried: "Halloran."
I said: "Mercer."
The booth across from me — the one between us — was empty.
I said: "You can come over here, Ryan, you don't have to shout it across Patrice's bacon line."
He came over.
He brought his coffee. He slid into the booth across from me. He did not, when he sat, put his hands on the table; he kept them in his lap. He had hands the way working hands look — broad-knuckled, flat-nailed, with a small white scar across the back of the right one that was probably ten years old and probably from a chisel.
"You didn't have to walk down," he said.
"I wanted coffee."
"There's a coffee machine in the kitchen. I saw it yesterday."
"You were on my porch yesterday."
"I was on your porch. The coffee machine was visible from the porch."
"You were noticing the coffee machine."
"I was — yeah."
He looked, for a second, like a man who had been caught at something small.
"It hadn't been used in eighteen months," I said. "I don't know if it still works."
"It's a Mr. Coffee. It works."
"Of course it does."
He drank his coffee. He looked at my plate. He looked at my plate the way a man looks at a meal he has decided he is not going to comment on.
"How much of the eggs is Patrice's decision," he said.
"All of it."
"Yeah."
§3 — Twist
The historic-board permit was the reason. I had to remember this, sitting in the booth across from Ryan Mercer at six-twenty-eight on a Saturday morning. The historic-board permit was the reason any of this was a conversation. The porch needed inspection. The inspection needed a permit. The permit needed a contractor of record. The contractor of record was, by document, a man four years dead, whose son was sitting across from me drinking the coffee Patrice had refilled without asking.
I said: "I have to redo the permit."
"Yeah."
"It's still in your father's name."
"Yeah."
"And I need to — "
"You need to put it in mine. Or in someone's. Tuesday meeting."
"Tuesday meeting. The historic board."
"Six p.m., basement of the Methodist."
"It used to be six-thirty."
"They moved it. The minister wanted his choir practice back on the half-hour."
"Of course."
"I can put it in mine," he said. "I can sign as the contractor. I have the license. The truck's registered. It's — Jess, it's a five-minute thing. I'll bring the form Tuesday. We sign together, the board votes, you have your permit. You get your inspection. The realtor gets her sign-off. You get to leave on schedule."
He said the last sentence flat, without inflection. You get to leave on schedule. It was the most words he had said in a row since I had met him as a thirteen-year-old. I noticed the flatness of the inflection. I did not, sitting there with the strawberry jam between us, know what to do with the noticing.
"Okay," I said.
"Okay."
"I'll see you Tuesday."
"I'll be on the porch tomorrow. The trim around the south sash. I have to do it before the cold sets."
"Right."
"You don't have to be there."
"It's my house, Ryan."
"That's not what I — "
"I know."
He looked at me a long second over the rim of his coffee cup. He had, I noticed, brown eyes — a kind of brown that was darker than the coffee. I had not, yesterday, registered the color. I registered it now and decided I had registered it now and went on registering it for two seconds longer than I needed to.
He set the cup down.
"Halloran," he said.
"Mercer."
"You ate the jam."
"I ate the jam. The jam is — "
"Yeah."
He almost smiled the half-thing again. He stood. He left a five on the counter. Patrice waved him off; he left it anyway. He said Patrice on the way out, and Patrice said Mercer, and the two of them did the small nod two people who have known each other thirty years do when one is leaving the other's place of work.
The bell on the door did its thing.
I was alone in the booth.
§4 — Cliffhanger
I walked back up Maple at seven-fifteen. The morning was clear. The maples on Maple Street had all turned in the past week — the burning kind of red they do, the red I had spent fourteen years explaining to people in Boston as something they had to drive five hours north to see, which was, depending on the year, mostly true. I noticed the red. I did not, this time, note that I had forgotten it.
The Halloran house was on the corner. Ryan's truck was already in front of the house when I came up the walk. He was, of course, an hour ahead of when he had said he would be. He was unloading the trim — primed pine boards, eight footers, that he had cut to the half-inch in his garage at five a.m.
He had also brought a permit form. He set it on the porch step. He said: "I made a copy. So you can read it before Tuesday. So nothing surprises you."
"Thanks."
I picked the form up.
I read it.
I read it slowly, because I am the kind of person who reads contracts and forms and the back labels of cleaning products, because I had spent fourteen years in the kind of professional life where reading the document is the difference between the deal and the disaster. I read the historic-board permit. I read the building department permit. I read the original 2022 contractor agreement. I read it twice.
The original contractor agreement had been issued in March of twenty-twenty-two. The contractor was Mercer Restoration, sole proprietor, Robert J. Mercer. The deposit had been for two thousand four hundred dollars. The scope of work was south rail rebuild, sash repair, ridge cap as required. The expected completion was spring of twenty-twenty-three.
The signature at the bottom of the form was Bobby Mercer's.
The signature line for the homeowner was my father's.
The toolbox on the porch behind me had Robert J. Mercer's last name painted on it in faded white block letters.
The toolbox on the porch behind me had been on the porch for four years.
I looked up.
Ryan was on the roof. He had climbed up the ladder while I was reading. He was working on the ridge cap.
"Ryan," I said.
He came down the ladder. He came down the ladder the way a man who has been on a roof a thousand times comes down a ladder, which is fast and smooth and without looking. He came over to the step.
"What."
I held the form out. I held it the way I held forms in conference rooms in Boston, which was at a small angle, with the relevant line near my thumb.
I said: "The toolbox."
"What about it."
"The toolbox has been on the porch since spring of twenty-twenty-two."
He did not say anything.
"Ryan."
"Yeah."
"Was your dad still on this job — was he on this porch — when he — "
I did not finish the sentence. I was, I noticed in some small clean part of my mind that was still keeping notes, not finishing sentences in this town. The not-finishing was happening in a way it had not happened in fourteen years of professional sentence-finishing.
Ryan looked at the toolbox. Ryan looked at it the way he looked at every other small detail of this porch, which was the way a man looks at a thing he has been looking at every day for four years and has not yet, in any of those days, set down.
He said: "He was here on a Wednesday afternoon. He was sanding the same rail I was sanding when you pulled up yesterday. He came home for dinner. He had a heart attack at eleven-twenty that night in the kitchen. The toolbox — Jess, the toolbox is on this porch because nobody — "
He stopped.
"Nobody," I said.
"Nobody moved it."
The porch was quiet. The harbor was quiet. The church bells were not on the hour or the half. The wind was not, this minute, moving any cedar shake. There was, in the absence of those sounds, a different kind of quiet — the kind of quiet that comes when you understand, for the first time, what a thing you had been looking at had actually been doing.
The toolbox had not been a toolbox.
The toolbox had been a man's last unfinished day.
I sat down on the step. I sat down because my knees were not deciding to keep me standing. I sat down with the historic-board permit in my lap and the toolbox a foot from my elbow and the four years of unfinished afternoon between Ryan Mercer's father and my own father humming somewhere just above the cedar shake.
Ryan stood at the bottom of the step. He did not, this time, sit. He waited.
I said: "I have a question I had not planned to ask."
"Ask it."
"Did my father — when your father — did anyone tell my father. Before."
"Your dad was already gone, Jess."
"What."
"Your dad died in March of twenty-twenty-two. The week after he signed the contract with mine. My dad was going to call you to ask what you wanted to do about the work. He hadn't, yet, when he — "
"My father — "
"I thought you knew."
I had not known.
I had known the date of my father's death — March of twenty-twenty-two — the way you know a date of a thing you were not present for: in the abstract, with paperwork, through an attorney's email, with a single short obituary I had read once and not read again. I had not known he had hired Bobby Mercer the week before. I had not known my father had been getting the porch ready. I had not known my father had been getting the porch ready for anything.
I held the toolbox in my eye for one more second. The MERCER on the lid. The smooth handle. The four years.
I had come back to leave.
The sentence had been, for fourteen years and especially for the last six weeks, the engine of my whole life. It had gotten me up I-95. It had gotten me into the Subaru at five a.m. yesterday. It had been waiting, fully formed and exactly five words long, in the front of my mouth.
The sentence was not, this morning, where I had left it.
I looked up at Ryan.
I said, in a voice I did not, even as it left me, recognize as my own: "He was getting it ready for me."
Ryan did not, again, answer.
He did not have to.
The toolbox, between us, was the answer. The toolbox had been the answer for four years.
The wind off the harbor moved the same single cedar shake on the south side of the house, the one I had heard sigh yesterday at four o'clock, and the sound of it shifting against its neighbor was, in the kind of quiet that had taken the porch, the loudest sound on Maple Street.
— to be continued in Ep3