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Allison slowed down.
She looked at the bag.
She looked at the street, both directions. Empty and quiet, the way November mornings were quiet, a different quality from summer quiet, more deliberate, like the town had turned its collar up and was keeping things closer.
She kept walking.
It went with her all the way to school.
* * *
She noticed the playground next.
She’d been meaning to ask about the south fence board, the one she’d seen was loose in September, and she went to look on her lunch break, walking the perimeter with her coffee the way she sometimes did when she needed ten minutes of not being inside.
The board wasn’t loose anymore.
She crouched down and looked at it, new wood, clean cut, fitted exactly right, the screws flush with the surface the way screws were when someone who knew what they were doing had put them in. She looked at the surrounding boards. All of them solid. All checked and secured, not just the one that had been the obvious problem.
She stood up.
She stood there in the cold November air and looked at the playground, at the climbing structure and the swings and the new board fitted into the fence, and felt something she couldn’t quite name move through her. Something that had nothing to do with the fence board and everything to do with what it meant that someone had fixed it without being asked and then checked every board around it.
She went back inside and taught her afternoon classes and tried not to think about it.
The thinking had other plans.
* * *
She asked Lauren on Friday.
“The grocery bags on Vera’s porch,” she said. “And the playground. And apparently the church steps got fixed last month and nobody knew who did it.”
Lauren looked at her over her lunch.
“And?” Lauren said.
“I think it’s him.”
“It’s him,” Lauren said simply.
“Does everyone know?”
“Everyone knows.” Lauren picked up her sandwich. “Nobody says anything because saying something would make him stop.”
Allison sat with that.
“Why would saying something make him stop?”
“Because he’s not doing it to be seen,” Lauren said. “He’s doing it because it needs doing. Those are two completely different things and he knows the difference.”
Allison thought about this for the rest of the day. And the day after. And, if she was being honest with herself, most of the days since Halloween, which had become a kind of before and after line in her mind without her deciding to make it one. Before Halloween and after Halloween. Before Vera’s porch in October firelight and after it.
She was in the after now, and the after felt different from the before in ways she was still mapping.
* * *
She went to Nora on Saturday.
