Page 23
Chapter 6
What the Town Knows
Shane Colter’s days had a shape to them.
Not a schedule, exactly (he didn’t keep a calendar or set reminders on his phone, which had been a source of ongoing low-level conflict with the county permit office for years) but a shape. A reliable sequence of things that happened in roughly the same order with roughly the same regularity, the way water found the same path down a hillside every time it rained.
Up at five thirty. Coffee from the machine on the kitchen counter while the sky outside the kitchen window went from black to gray to the pale gold that meant the mountains were catching the first light before it reached the valley floor. Shower. The reliable rotation of six flannel shirts, which he acknowledged was a system other people found funny and he found practical, because they all worked and required no decisions. Out the door by six forty-five.
The hardware store opened at seven. He was always there by six fifty.
The ten minutes between arriving and opening were his. The store quiet and still, smelling like metal and wood and the dusty warmth of a building that had been used for decades by people who meant business. He walked the floor most mornings, checking the shelves, noting what needed restocking, listening for the sounds an old building made when something was about to need attention. He knew the sounds of this building the way he knew his own breathing. He’d been listening to them since he was seven years old.
He opened at seven. He locked up at six. In between, the day happened.
* * *
It was a Tuesday in early September, school had started the week before, the first of the summer people were leaving, Merrybrook settling back into its quieter self, when he got the call from Vera Hutchins about her car.
Vera was eighty-one and had lived in the small blue house on Birch Street for forty years, and her car, a 1998 Buick that she drove exclusively to the grocery store and the library and, on the third Sunday of every month, to a card game at Margaret Finley’s house, had been making a sound she described over the phone as like a cat being stepped on, but worse.
“I’ll take a look,” he said.
“I don’t want to put you out.”
“You’re not.”
He went on his lunch break. The sound turned out to be a belt, straightforward, twenty minutes of work, he had the part in the storeroom. He fixed it, checked the oil while he was there because the oil was low, filled it. Vera brought him a piece of what she called apricot coffee cake and he called a reason to skip whatever he’d been planning to have for lunch, which was nothing because he generally forgot lunch.
“You didn’t have to do the oil,” she said.
“It needed doing.”
“What do I owe you?”
“Nothing.”
She looked at him the way people did when they’d known him a long time and had stopped arguing about this point. “You’re a good man, Shane Colter.”
He handed her the car keys and went back to the store.
* * *
He replaced a section of rotted fence board at the elementary school playground on his way home that evening.
He’d noticed it two weeks ago, a board at the far end of the climbing structure that had gone soft with moisture and was one energetic eight-year-old away from becoming a liability. He’d mentioned it to Helen Marsh, who had said yes she knew and it was on the maintenance list, and then nothing had happened because things on maintenance lists moved at a pace that Shane had never had the patience for.
He parked on the street and took the board and the tools from the truck bed and had it done in thirty-five minutes. It was the kind of job that looked more complicated than it was once you knew what you were doing, which he did, because he’d been doing this kind of thing since his father taught him that fixing things before they broke was a different order of business from fixing them after, and that the first kind was better.
Nobody was there. School had ended hours ago. The playground was empty in the early evening light, the swings moving slightly in a breeze coming off the mountain.
He gathered his tools. He looked at the fixed board for a moment, level, solid, the new wood bright against the weathered gray of the rest.
He took the long way back past the library on Elm Street, because he always did, and his eye went where it always went. The blank back wall, the one that faced the lake. A reading room belonged there. Glass on three sides, the water right outside, the afternoon light coming in low across the tables. He had known that since he was nineteen.
He didn’t slow down.
He drove home.
