Page 31

"Okay," she says.

She turns and walks back down her side of the porch. Her door closes without a sound, which is worse than a slam.

I pack in eleven minutes. It takes that long because there's almost nothing out of its box. I stand in the middle of my half-empty living room with the duffel at my feet and a wall at my back. The only sound in the house is the radiator. I realize with a flat cold shock that I've lived here for two days and I haven't hung a single picture.

I don't know what to do with my hands.

I go down to the basement. I find the stock of white oak I carried in on Friday from the truck, and a saw, a plane, a square. I take the last stair apart where it's rotted through. It takes the whole afternoon. I cut a new tread by hand, plane it until it shines, fit it into the stringers, and drive the nails home in clean, even strokes.

Overhead, her footsteps cross the floor a few times and stop. I hear something dragging across wood. Then, very faintly, a long wet sound I don't understand until much later. A brush loaded with paint going down a big surface. The sound of somebody working at full arm's length.

I stop with the hammer in my hand and listen to it for a minute.

At 3:40, I test the stair. It holds. I step on it with my full weight, once, twice. It doesn't give. I pull the carpenter's pencil from my pocket and crouch at the stringer. In the corner, in small block capitals, I write: DOESN'T LIE NOW. —B.

I load the truck. Duffel, tool roll, the box I never opened. The paper bag from the porch rail sits on the passenger seat. I don't look at it.

At ten past four, I'm in the driver's seat with the key in my hand and the window down. The street is empty and gold. A couple of porches over, somebody's hung a scarecrow in a chair. The wind turns its sleeve.

Dale's number is the last call on my phone. My thumb sits above it.

I listen. I can't help it. I sit in the cab with the engine off and the whole of Larkspur Lane around me and I listen for the wall. For the plates and the radio and the humming. For any sound at all from the other side of the plaster.

My left ear starts, very softly, to ring.

I close my eyes. The sound is thin and high and familiar, the same wire that's been strung behind my jaw since the day I woke up in a hospital in Germany with a doctor telling me I was lucky. I've been lucky for fourteen months. I've been lucky in empty apartments in three different states, lucky in the truck, lucky on job sites where the noise is loud enough that I don't have to hear the noise in my own head. I got very good at being lucky alone.

I open my eyes and look at the porch light, still burning yellow in the middle of the afternoon.

She couldn't turn it off.

I sit there for another twenty minutes. The sun slips lower. The porch light stays on.

At 4:23, a car pulls up. An old woman in a lavender coat gets out with a pie. I watch her climb the steps and knock. I watch the door open. I see Hollis's face for one second before she turns away. She's been crying.

The door closes. I look at my phone.

Dale picks up on the first ring.

"Change of plans," I say. "I need the Marion job. The instructor lead. Is it still open?"

There's a pause. "It is. You sure?"

"I'm sure."

"You're giving up a six-month contract."

"I'm taking a better one." I look at the porch light, still burning yellow in the daylight. "I'll be at Marion Tuesday morning. But I'm not rolling out tonight."

"Mercer, what the hell's in that town?"

"Everything," I say, and hang up.

I sit with the phone in my hand. The key is still in the ignition. I haven't turned it.

At 5:17, the old woman leaves. At 5:43, the lights in Hollis's house go out with an audible snap. I almost smile.

At 5:51, I get out of the truck. I drop the duffel inside my door and stand in the kitchen with my back to the wall.