The ground out here in Taylor County doesn’t really thaw until late April, which means Harlan was put down into frozen clay that Friday when the wind was coming straight off the ridge and rattling the bare oak branches against the cemetery fence. Renee didn’t wear black because her dad always told her black attracted the sun and made you sweat for no good reason.
She wore that navy blue coat her grandmother handed down to her back when the mill was still running three shifts a week, and she kept her hands buried deep in the pockets so nobody could see how hard she was shaking. I stood right beside her with my own boots sinking an inch into the muddy grass, holding a Pyrex dish of scalloped potatoes wrapped in three layers of aluminum foil that nobody was ever going to eat.
Harlan had been coughing since Thanksgiving, but he was the kind of stubborn old man who would rather swallow a box of nails than admit his chest hurt.
He was sixty-eight years old, and he had built half the front porches standing on Main Street with those exact hands that were now resting quiet inside a polished oak box. Sylvia had only been in the picture four years, ever since that church supper down at the Methodist basement where she sat across from him and laughed at a joke about a broken tractor belt. Nobody knew her people from around here. She came up from Charleston with two suitcases and a yellow cat she let jump all over the kitchen counters, and within six months she had Harlan’s name on the mailbox and his first wife’s blue willow plates packed away in boxes in the shed.
“You look after Renee if anything happens to me,” Harlan had told me back in October. We were standing out by my truck while he loaded a sack of feed into the bed, and he didn’t look me in the eye when he said it. He just stared at the rust on my tailgate like it was the most interesting thing in the world.
“Harlan, you’re younger than I am,” I told him.
“Just look after her,” he said again, and that was all the talking he ever did about what came after.
The funeral ended the way those things always do in a town where everybody knows your middle name and what you owe the feed store.
People shook our hands, murmured things about the Lord taking His own in His own time, and hurried off to their warm cars because the sleet had started spitting down through the gray sky. Renee got into my passenger seat without a word, her breath fogging the cold glass as she stared straight ahead at the dashboard. We drove back to her house on Maple Street, the little place Harlan had built with his own hammer back when he and his first wife were first married, and we sat in my idling sedan for ten minutes because neither of us wanted to turn the motor off.
By Monday morning, the sleet had turned into a steady, freezing drizzle that made the whole world look like it was rubbed down with wet slate. Renee drove over in her little red hatchback around 9:02 to start going through her dad’s old work shirts and the tackle box he kept behind the basement stairs. I stayed home to fold laundry, but my mind kept drifting back to that porch on Maple Street the way a tongue finds a loose tooth.
Twenty minutes later my telephone rang, sharp and ugly against the quiet of the house. It was Renee, and she didn’t even say hello.
“My key won’t go in,” she said, and her voice sounded thin like paper.
“What do you mean it won’t go in?” I asked, dropping my dish towel right on the kitchen floor.
“The whole lock is different, Clara. There’s a shiny brass plate on the door and my key just spins.”
I didn’t wait to grab my coat. I backed my Buick out of the drive so fast I clipped the corner of the low stone wall by the hydrangea bushes, but I didn’t care. When I pulled up behind her red car on Maple Street, Sylvia was standing right there in the doorway with her arms crossed over a fleece vest that looked like it cost more than my weekly grocery budget.
Renee was standing on the bottom step, looking up with her hands tucked into her pockets just like she had at the cemetery three days before. Out by the curb, sitting right in the wet gutter where the runoff from the melting sleet was pooling, was Harlan’s green metal tool chest. The lid was sprung open an inch, showing the yellow handle of his favorite pipe wrench and a handful of rusted deck screws glinting in the pale light.
“This is my house now,” Sylvia said, and she didn’t even drop her voice to be polite about it. “Take what fits in your car and get.”
“That’s my dad’s box,” Renee said, and her voice didn’t shake, which somehow made it worse to listen to. “His father gave him that before I was even born.”
“Shouldn’t have left it on my porch then,” Sylvia said. “I’m clearing out the junk. The garbage truck comes Wednesday morning, and whatever’s left goes in the back of the hopper.”
I wanted to say something. I had fifty years of words built up in my throat, things about decency and church pews and promises made over hospital beds while a good woman was breathing her last. But I just stood there by the front fender of my car with the cold rain hitting my glasses, and I stayed entirely silent. I swallowed my own tongue because I was scared of making things worse for Renee, and that silence felt like lead sitting right in the pit of my stomach.
A minute later, our neighbor Wendell opened his side garage door across the street and looked over the top of his spectacles. He didn’t yell or wave his arms. He just walked across the wet asphalt in his house slippers, grabbed the heavy iron handles of Harlan’s green box without a word to Sylvia, and wheeled it straight back into his own dry garage before the woman could even draw another breath to yell at him. I could have kissed that old man right there in the street.
Renee didn’t scream. She didn’t throw a fit on the porch the way some folks would have done. She walked back to her car, opened the trunk, and loaded two cardboard boxes of photograph albums that Sylvia had apparently deemed small enough to allow out the door. Then she drove straight back to my kitchen and sat at my table with her hands flat on the oilcloth cover, staring at the little white flowers printed on the vinyl until her knuckles went gray.
“I didn’t even get his winter coat,” she whispered after about twenty minutes of quiet.
“I know, honey,” I said, setting a mug of hot tea in front of her that she never touched.
I didn’t tell her about the envelope right then. I couldn’t. I was too ashamed of myself for standing on that porch like a fence post while Sylvia treated Harlan’s life like trash left out for the dindins. But I remembered what Harlan had told me back in October when he came by with the bag of feed, and I remembered the heavy linen paper he had slid across my kitchen counter with my own name written on it in that blocky carpenter’s hand.
“If something happens, you make sure Dale Whitman gets this,” Harlan had said. “He’ll know what to do.”
Dale Whitman was a retired machinist from the old glass works down in Grafton, a man who didn’t use five words when two would do just fine, and he kept his lawn mowed down to the dirt every Tuesday of the year. He was Harlan’s friend from the VFW hall where they used to sit in the corner booth and drink lukewarm black coffee out of thick ceramic mugs while they talked about carburetors and county taxes.
The Tuesday after the funeral, I drove past the VFW hall and then kept going out to Dale’s place on the creek road. He was out in his pole barn scraping paint off an old wooden ladder when I pulled my Buick up by his gravel pile. He didn’t drop his scraper right away. He finished the stroke, wiped his hand on his gray work trousers, and looked down at me through the open door of the truck.
I didn’t make a speech. I just reached into my purse, pulled out the manila envelope with Harlan’s name scrawled across the front in pencil, and handed it to him through the window.
“He said you’d know,” was all I told him.
Dale took it, turned it over once in his scarred fingers, and nodded real slow the way men do when they’re checking to see if a floor joist is level. “Harlan was always a careful man,” he said, and he put the envelope right inside his shirt pocket over his heart.
Three days later, on a Friday morning exactly one week after we put Harlan into the frozen ground, a battered blue pickup truck rolled right up Maple Street and parked two inches off the curb in front of Sylvia’s newly locked front door. It wasn’t the county trash crew with their orange jumpers and their loud hydraulic lift. It was Dale Whitman, and he was wearing his Sunday coat, the brown tweed one with the leather patches on the elbows that he hadn’t worn since his own wife passed back in ninety-four.
He didn’t knock once. He knocked three times, heavy and slow, the kind of knock that makes you drop whatever you’re holding in the kitchen because you know whoever is on the other side isn’t going away until you open up.
I was sitting in my kitchen across the street with my curtains pulled back an inch, holding my breath so hard my ribs ached.
Sylvia pulled the door open about six inches, the exact same way she had done to Renee, and her mouth started moving before she even got her glasses settled on her nose. I couldn’t hear the words from across the asphalt, but I saw the way Dale didn’t flinch. He just reached into his coat pocket, pulled out a folded set of heavy legal papers tied with a piece of rough twine, and held them out toward her chest.
Sylvia looked down at the paper, then up at Dale’s face, and for the first time since I’d known her, the color went entirely out of her cheeks. She didn’t reach for the paper. She just stood there in the doorway, her mouth half open, while Dale turned around and walked back down her steps without saying a single word.
Renee was sitting right beside me at my kitchen table, her hands wrapped around her cold tea mug, and she looked over at me with her eyes wide and dark.
“What is Dale doing over there?” she asked.
“He’s just returning a tool,” I told her, and for the first time in a week, the knot in my chest loosened just enough for me to take a real breath.
