There was not a house on Larkspur Court that Amos Keller had not been inside of, toolbox in hand, at one time or another. He had replaced the Sorensens' water heater and refused to discuss what the job should have cost. He had coaxed the Almeida's grandfather clock into keeping time and left with a plate of empanadas he had not been able to refuse, because Mrs. Almeida had a way of making refusal feel like an insult to her ancestors. Pipes, pumps, furnaces, a balky garage door, a washing machine that walked across the floor every spin cycle β if it was made of moving parts and it had stopped moving the way it should, the court brought it to Amos, and Amos, more often than not, made it right.
He charged what the parts cost, when he charged at all. For the widows he charged nothing and invented reasons: the part had been in his truck already, he'd been meaning to test that wrench. People had long since stopped arguing. You thanked Amos Keller, and you found some other way to be kind to him that he couldn't deflect β a pie left on the porch rail, a jar of somebody's tomatoes β and mostly he let those stand, because Ruth had taught him, over forty-one years, that refusing a gift was its own kind of rudeness.
Ruth had been the talkative one. That was how the marriage had divided its labors, the way other couples divided the bills. She had done the visiting, the remembering of birthdays, the standing in driveways to hear how somebody's daughter had done at college. Amos had done the fixing, and had been content to be the quiet half of a well-known pair. Since her death the house at number seven had not gone neglected β Amos was constitutionally incapable of neglect β but it had gone quiet. The rooms were clean. The curtains opened and closed on schedule. But nobody's music played in it anymore, and the second chair sat pushed in, the way a chair sits when it is furniture and not a place.
His days had a shape, and the shape did not vary. Coffee at five-thirty, taken standing at the counter while the radio murmured the farm report. A walk to the river path and back before the heat. Work in the garage or the yard through the morning β there was always a neighbor's project on the bench, a mower deck to weld, a pump to rebuild. Lunch. The afternoon quieter. And most evenings, he would be seen crossing his back yard with a flashlight and his ring of keys, on his way to the shed.
The shed stood against the fence he shared with the Pruitts, and the fence was a subject on which Donna Pruitt had thoughts. It was a good fence β Amos had built it himself fifteen years ago, cedar, six feet, the boards still true. What Donna could not make sense of, and what she turned over in the small hours, was that Amos maintained both sides of it. Twice a year he came down his side with the brush, and twice a year, without asking, without announcing, he came down her side too, moving her garden bench and her terracotta pots, staining her boards to match his, setting everything back exactly as he had found it. Steve, her husband, called it neighborly. Steve traveled four days out of five selling fasteners and could afford to find things neighborly from a hotel room in Fort Wayne. Donna stood at her kitchen window and watched the old man stain her fence in the September sun and thought: nobody maintains the far side of a fence out of kindness. You maintained a fence you needed. You maintained the ground along it. You kept the whole strip tidy and familiar and yours, so that nobody else ever had a reason to look at it closely.
She had tried, once, to thank him, early on, before the notebook had a section in the back. She had brought over a coffee cake when he was halfway down her side with the brush. He had accepted the plate with a nod and set it on the ladder where it would not get stain on it, and answered her questions β how long had he lived here, did he miss the plant β in sentences so short and final that the conversation died standing up, the way a small engine dies when you close the choke. He wasn't rude. That was the thing nobody could ever honestly say about Amos Keller. He was simply closed, like a well-made door.
That fall the hum had a pattern, if you were a person who kept patterns, and Donna was. It ran when the river ran high. It ran after rains. On the driest nights of August it had not run at all, and she had lain awake anyway, finding it worse than the noise.