The Girl at Pump Seven: What She Told the Biker

Chapter 3: The Graves

The house on Sulfur Run Road was kept the way a church is kept by a sexton who no longer believes the congregation is coming but keeps it anyway. Boone dusted on Mondays. He ran the vacuum in its lines. June's cookbooks stood on their shelf by size, as she had kept them, and her reading glasses rested on the top one, folded, in case the afternoon light was good. Willa's room he kept with the door open and the bed made, the stuffed bear population reduced over the years by attrition and mice to a loyal four. Men who had visited once — a cousin, a man from the union hall — did not visit again, and said, not unkindly, that the place felt held. Boone did not know what else a house was supposed to feel like. Two people had lived in it. They still did. It was only their attendance that had changed.

He ate standing at the counter, most nights, off one plate, with the radio on to the weather. He was not punishing himself; the table seated six and a man alone at a table for six was a picture he declined to be in. At the counter a man was simply a man eating, with his tools in reach and the sink two steps off, and there was dignity in the arrangement of the way there is dignity in a well-set workbench.

The hall closet he did not open.

It was an ordinary door between the kitchen and the front room, narrow, with a brass knob worn bright on one side. Behind it, in the weeks after the funerals, he had put the things he could not have in the rooms and could not give away: June's winter coat. The box from the hospital, which the hospital had labeled in marker with her name and which he had never opened. A pair of small boots, mud dried on them four years dry now. He believed Willa's things were in there too — he told Miriam so, the time she asked — though the truth, which he kept in a different drawer of himself, was that he did not know what was in the closet anymore in any complete way, and the not knowing had become the lock. He passed the door forty times a day. He put his hand on the knob sometimes, the way a man tests a fence. Then he went on about his morning.

At Fairhill he had his appointments. June first, because she would have teased him for making her wait, then Willa, three plots down in the row the funeral home had called the Garden, as if a name could do landscaping. He did not talk aloud. He stood with his hands in his jacket and considered the stones the way he considered an engine — respectfully, and with attention to the particulars. Birth, death, beloved. He had chosen the word beloved twice, against the funeral director's suggestion of a verse, because it was the only summary he trusted.

His sister Miriam called from Florida on Sundays, when her rates of missing him peaked, and he was always glad and always immovable. She had a condo with a lanai and a church with a widow's group and an argument she rotated like crops: sell the house, come south, learn to eat fish. "I'm learning to eat fish up here, Miriam," he'd say. "They sell it at the Giant Eagle." She would laugh the laugh that meant she was crying a little. "You're a house with the lights on and nobody home, Eli." "Lights are on," he said. "That's the report from here."

He kept other appointments the living made for him. The dentist in April, who cleaned his teeth in respectful silence and charged him for a full hour. The union physical in June. The barber on Main who had cut his hair since Willa was born and who still asked after no one, having learned. These were the tolls the world collected for leaving a man alone, and Boone paid them promptly and without resentment, the way he paid the light bill.

In the evenings he worked. The Glide got its maintenance in full and on schedule; the pickup got what it needed; neighbors' mowers and a generator and Otis's walk-in compressor got the rest, and he charged what he charged, which for widows and old men was a dozen eggs or nothing, and for others a number low enough that Otis told him he was ruining the market for despair. It was not despair. That was the thing nobody could see from outside the size of him. Despair did not dust on Mondays. Despair did not feed roses on Tuesdays. What Boone had was a roster, and he worked it, Saturday to Saturday, pump seven to Fairhill and home — and the roster, so far, had been enough to fill the exact shape of him.