The appeals took the rest of the year, and they had the rhythm of all such things, hopeful in the filing and quiet in the answer. The union grievance went first, argued by a representative who believed in it the way a man believes in an umbrella in hard rain. Then the civil service board, in a room smaller than the hearing room, with a table that wobbled, where Holt wore the wedding suit again because it was the only suit he owned and sat with his hands folded while men and women he had never met discussed him in the third person. The board upheld the termination in a letter of two pages. The letter used the word sustained four times and the word final once, and the final was the one he read standing in his kitchen until the letters of it stopped arranging themselves into any appeal.
Bureau policy gave a separated officer thirty days to clear his locker, and the thirty days went by with Holt telling himself he would go on a quiet morning, early, when the locker room would be empty. On the thirty first day a facilities man named on the work order only by initials went down the row with a sergeant as witness, and bolt cutters where the lock would not answer, and emptied locker after locker of the recently departed. Holt's was one of four that week.
They put his things in a property box and sealed it with tape and wrote his name on the side in marker. A pair of spare boots, polished out of a habit older than the complaint file. A coffee mug with a chip in the rim. A paperback with a cracked spine and a bus transfer for a bookmark. A photograph in a plastic sleeve, the academy class on the courthouse steps, forty young faces squinting into the sun, his own among them with hair. At the bottom, wrapped in a spare uniform shirt, a small brass colored plate, unscrewed from above the locker door by the facilities man because the work order said to strip the fixture. It carried only a locker number. It was not the number anyone knew him by. It went into the box anyway, because the box was where his years were going.
He collected it at the property desk on a gray morning in the new year. The young clerk did not know his name and asked him to print it on the release form, and to sign below the print, and Holt did both in the careful hand of a man who had written a thousand reports, and carried it out past the flagpole to a car with a tired battery and a passenger seat that took the weight fine.
Consequences, he was learning, keep office hours. They do not ambush a man at night the way guilt does. They make appointments. A lawyer's bill on the first of the month. A pension statement with a smaller number than the one he had carried in his head for a decade. The hip, unimpressed by any of it, aching on its own schedule. An interview for a night security post at a warehouse by the river, where a man half his age asked why he had left the bureau, and Holt heard himself say, I was terminated, plainly, in a level voice, and understood that it was the first honest sentence of his account that he had ever given out loud, and that it had taken the loss of everything to get it said.
He did not drive down Ashbury Lane. He told himself it was respect, and some of it was, and some of it was simpler. Once, on an errand across town, he came within one street of it and sat at the light a long time after it changed, and a horn behind him brought him back, and he turned the other way, toward the river, and did not look in the mirror.
At night the apartment held the sounds apartments hold, pipes and a refrigerator and traffic learning the wet street. He would be standing at the sink and hear it then, not the water, never the water. The laugh. The laugh arrived without permission, the way it must have arrived for the woman of twenty six and the man outside his church, and he would set down whatever he was holding and say the words to the empty room, the words that had stopped at a kitchen table three times. Judge Greer, I am sorry. He said them correctly now, with the what for attached, in order, without decoration. The room received them the way rooms do. It was practice, and he knew it was only practice, and he kept the appointments anyway, alarm set for a morning that had not yet told him what it wanted, because a man who has learned that consequences keep office hours has at least learned to be on time for something.