Chapter 1: Larkspur Court
Larkspur Court was the kind of street a realtor photographed in October, when the maples went the color of old copper and the eight houses sat in a neat crescent around the turning circle, each with its porch, its trimmed hedge, its flag or flower box or birdbath. People who bought there tended to stay. The Pruitts had been in number nine for eleven years. The Almeidas at number three were going on twenty. And at number seven, where the lots ran deep toward the river woods, lived Amos Keller, who had been there longer than anyone and said less than anyone about it.
His house was not the grandest on the court, but it was the tidiest. The paint never peeled long. The gutters never sagged. In winter his walk was shoveled before the plows came through, and in summer his lawn had the deep, even green of a man who watered on a schedule. Behind the house, hard against the fence line he shared with the Pruitts, stood his shed: painted the same soft gray as the house, with a padlock on the door that had a polished look to it, the look of a lock opened and closed every day.
What the neighbors knew about Amos could be listed on an index card. He was sixty-six. He had worked as a young industrial mechanic at the Harrow Fertilizer plant, which had employed half the county before it closed. His wife, Ruth, had died five years back, and people still spoke of her the way you speak of weather you miss β she had run the church rummage sale, she had known every child's name on the street. Amos fixed things. That was the second thing on the card, and for most of Larkspur Court it was the only thing that mattered.
He had rehung the Almeida boy's bicycle chain in the driveway, kneeling in the gravel, refusing the lemonade and the dollar both. He had rebuilt Mrs. Sorensen's porch railing after the ice took it, working two afternoons, and when she tried to pay him he told her the wood had been taking up space in his garage and she was doing him the favor. He had kept old Mr. Whitaker's furnace alive through three winters past the point where two companies had condemned it, appearing with his toolbox whenever the house on the corner went cold.
The third thing on the card was the hum.
It came from the shed, or from somewhere near it, and it came at night β not every night, and never loud. It was the sort of sound you noticed only when you were already awake: a low, steady thrumming that traveled through the ground more than the air, so that a glass on a nightstand might tremble, and a dog might lift its head from its paws and then put it down again. Donna Pruitt, next door at number nine, noticed it the way she noticed everything on Larkspur Court, which was completely, and in writing.
Donna kept a notebook. She would have said she kept it for the garden club, for the homeowner association minutes, for the hundred small administrative threads, and some of that was true. But the notebook had a section, toward the back, with dates. June 3rd: hum, 11:40 p.m. to 1:15 a.m. June 19th: hum, with a vibration in the kitchen floor. July 2nd: shed light on at 2 a.m., off at 2:20. She wrote these down the way other people pressed flowers β not out of malice, exactly, but out of a deep conviction that the world was held together by people paying attention.
On a Tuesday in early September, the meter reader came down Larkspur Court with his tablet and his hi-vis vest, working his way house to house the way he did every month. Donna was pruning the hedge by her front walk, which put her in a position to observe him without appearing to. He read the Almeidas' meter and moved on. He read hers and moved on. At Amos's house he stopped. He stood a long moment in front of the gray meter box, then walked around the house β around the back, where Donna could not see β and was gone four minutes, and when he came back he was writing something on the tablet, frowning at it, the way a man writes down a number he does not quite believe.
Donna's shears went snip, snip, snip, unhurried, while her eyes stayed on him. The meter reader got in his truck and drove off down the court. That evening she opened the notebook to the section in the back, and under the date she wrote: Meter man stayed long. Went behind the house. Wrote something down.
Then she sat a while, listening to the quiet street, waiting β the way she waited most nights now β for the hum to start.
Chapter 2: The Handyman