"Because I do not like who I hear myself being, in this house, when I am frightened," she said. "I called that day because I was frightened, and I have had a year to be honest about what I was frightened of. It was not a man fixing his door. A new neighbor should have been a casserole. I know that. I knew it by the time I wrote you. Denver will not fix it, but my grandchildren might have opinions that do. I wanted to say that on a sidewalk and not in another letter. Letters are too easy to write well."
Traffic would have interrupted them anywhere else. On Willow Creek Lane there was only the cold, and the leaves, and a man standing in the yard that was his, listening to the woman who had once told a dispatcher otherwise.
"I kept your letter," Derek said. "I want you to know that too. I read it more than once. I didn't answer it because I didn't want to write something for the sake of the street. If I'd answered, it would have been for you or not at all, and I wasn't ready to be fair. That's my part of this year, and I'm not proud of the timing."
Barbara nodded slowly. "Fair is a great deal to ask of a person in April," she said. "I have learned something about asking it."
"Denver's good country," Derek said. "Your daughter — tell her the stairs argument is the one that works. It's the truth and it lets everybody off easy, where easy is allowed."
A sound escaped her that was almost a laugh. "You sound like my husband. He said a true reason that also spares people is a gift and not a lie."
"He sounds right."
"He usually was, which was extremely irritating for forty years." She gathered her small pile of leaves with the rake, a woman finishing a task she had invented for the sake of the errand beneath it. "The broker says the house will go quickly. Young family, perhaps. I hope — I hope whoever comes next gets the street as it is now, and not as I was determined to keep it. You and George and that fence. It looks well, the fence."
"George takes full credit," Derek said. "I supervised the credit."
This time she did laugh, briefly, and then she put out no hand and he offered none, because some distances are crossed by honesty and not by gestures, and the conversation itself had been the crossing. She wished him a quiet winter. He wished her a safe move and grandchildren with strong opinions. She went up her walk to the house she had lived in for twenty-one years.
Derek finished his raking as the light failed. The sign stood in her yard in the dusk, ordinary as any sign on any street in Arlington, and he could look at it without the old tightening in his chest. He thought about the year: a door still not finished, a fence standing straight, two students writing plans at kitchen tables, a young officer learning to speak sooner, and a woman choosing, late and at cost, to describe herself accurately. None of it undid April. He had stopped asking life to undo things. It was enough that the street had become a place where people said what was true, out loud, where the person it concerned could hear it.
He carried the rake to his garage, hung it on its nail, and went in through the oak door, pulling it closed behind him with the familiar, final half inch of effort, into the warmth of his own house.
Chapter 26: The Door, Finished
Derek Malone stood in the front hall of 412 Willow Creek Lane early on a Saturday and looked at the oak door the way he had looked at it for months, not with frustration anymore, but with a decision. The door had swollen again in the summer humidity. It stuck at the top corner, dragged at the threshold, and opened only when he lifted it slightly by the handle and pulled with his shoulder. He had begun the repair in his first week in the colonial house in Cedar Bluff, before most of his boxes were unpacked, before Barbara Nielsen across the street had called 911, before anyone on the street knew his name. That morning, with a plane, a chisel, sandpaper, and a pot of coffee cooling on the porch rail, he meant to finish it.
He took the door off its hinges for the third time since he had bought the house for cash outside Arlington, Virginia, and laid it across two sawhorses in the driveway. At thirty-nine, six foot two, he still moved like a man used to carrying weight without comment, but he was careful with the door. It was solid oak, older than the subdivision around it, and heavier than it looked. George Park came over from next door with a second cordless drill and held the top end steady while Derek backed the hinge screws out one by one.
"You could have replaced it," George said, not for the first time.
"I know," Derek said.
George nodded as if that settled the matter. He had learned, over fence repairs and borrowed tools and long talks that did not require much talking, that Derek did not keep things out of stubbornness. He kept them because they could still do their job if someone did the work right.
By nine o'clock the sun was warm on the driveway. Derek ran his palm along the upper edge of the door where the wood had swelled and caught against the frame. He marked the high spots with a pencil, set the plane, and shaved thin curls that smelled faintly clean and bitter. His knee complained when he crouched too long, the old stiffness that came before weather changed, and he shifted his weight without making a show of it. The scar above his left hip pulled a little when he twisted to reach the far end. Twelve years as an Army Ranger and five years of defense contracting afterward had left their inventory on his body, and he treated it the way he treated the door. He noticed it. He worked around it. He did not ask it to be something else.
Monica Malone called while he was sanding. He put her on speaker and set the phone on an overturned paint bucket.
"Tell me you are not finally doing that door," she said.
"I am finally doing that door."
His sister laughed. "You started that door before you had curtains."
"The door was here before both of us," he said. "It had seniority."
She asked if he needed help, and he said George was there. She asked if he was feeding George, and George, overhearing, called out that he was being paid in coffee and supervision. Monica said she would come by Sunday with groceries if Derek promised not to turn lunch into another project. He promised, and neither of them quite believed it, and the call ended the way their calls usually ended, easy and unhurried.