Evie Marsh woke to thunder, and lay a moment sorting it, the way a woman who has lived eighty-one years in one valley learns to do. Not weather. The sky through her curtain was clean and pale. Not a train; the tracks were nine miles off and the sound was wrong besides, too close and too many-hearted, a rolling that came up through the floorboards and into the bed frame and settled in her ribs.
She was on the porch in her robe before she had decided to be, one hand on the door frame, her hair still in its night braid.
They filled her street. They filled Hank Breslin's street and her yard and the empty lot where the cottonwood came down in the storm. Motorcycles in rows like a crop somebody had planted in the night, chrome catching the first sun, and men and women standing beside them in the road dust, stretching, rolling their shoulders, quiet in the way of people who have ridden far to be somewhere on purpose.
At the front of all of it, a man took off his helmet.
She knew him. She had known him wet through and half his proper height, at her kitchen sink with a towel around his shoulders, lying through his teeth about his name. He was grey at the temples now and broad as a door, and he came up her broken steps β carefully, she noticed, he tested the second one β and stopped below her, cap of dust on his boots.
"Mrs. Marsh," Cole said. "We heard your roof leaks."
She meant to answer like a person. What came out of her was a sound she had not made since the graveside, and then her face was in her hands, and his hand was on the porch rail, not touching her, just near, the way Walter used to stand near a spooked horse.
But grief, in that yard, was not given time to settle. It never stood a chance. Because behind Cole the whole morning was already moving β Gus Halvorsen was on her roof with a pry bar and two sons, and the tear-off had begun before her tears had finished; shingles came down in sliding black sheets, and a tarp crew, and a dump trailer backing in with a beep that somebody apologized for, to the roof. Emil the well man was at her pump with his head cocked, listening like a doctor. Deena the electrician stood at her panel with a flashlight in her teeth, making the soft disgusted noises of a woman reading bad news in an old book.
And the neighbors came. That was the part she would tell about, later, when she could talk again. They came out of their houses with coffee in pots meant for company, with casseroles still in the pans they'd baked in, with folding chairs and a card table and a thermos of something Hank Breslin called tea and nobody believed. Mrs. Alaniz brought tamales wrapped in a dish towel. The Petrakis boy dragged his father's cooler down the street in a wagon. Somebody's grandmother took charge of the water station with the authority of a field marshal and would not be moved from it, not even by Cole, who saluted her.
Hank Breslin stood at the fence between their yards with his hat in his hands and wept openly into his sleeve, in great wet sniffs, and when the Petrakis boy asked him straight out if he was crying, Hank said, "No," without looking up, "it's the dust," and the boy nodded like a young diplomat and went to fetch him a chair.
Evie stood on her porch in her robe and her braid and watched it happen to her house, to her street, to the whole shape of her life. At some point a cup of coffee appeared in her hand, hot and strong and sweetened exactly right, though she never saw who gave it to her.
A young prospect β nineteen, maybe, with a sunburnt nose and his patch still new enough to stand proud of the vest β materialized at her elbow with a folding chair, opened it with a snap, and set it where she could see the whole yard. "Foreman's chair, ma'am," he said, grave as a butler, and vanished before she could tell him she had never in her life sat down to watch other people work. Then she sat down, because her knees had opinions of their own, and from the chair she took command of the one province she fully understood: she sent the boy back with instructions about the shade, the water, and where extension cords crossed the walk, and the boy ran, delighted to be ruled.
"Mr. Rafferty," she said at last, when Cole passed with an armload of fascia board, "you can't fix the whole world before breakfast."
"No ma'am," he said. "Just this house. The world's on its own till lunch."
Chapter 13: The Work