When she finished, she leaned the shovel against the fence and rubbed her lower back. No one had seen her work. No one was going to say, “Nice job.” She told herself that didn’t bother her.
Frank showed up at the fence around eleven, moving slow, leaning on his cane, watching the ground the way a man watches a dog he doesn’t fully trust.
— Still upright? — Eleanor called from the porch.
He stopped and looked up. Something crossed his face halfway between surprise and offense, as if the question itself was a little out of line.
— My back, — he said, in the tone of a man delivering bad news. — It’s killing me. You wouldn’t believe it.
— I’d believe it, — Eleanor said, stepping down from the porch.
— You ought to have some of that mint tonic, — Frank offered, resting both hands on the cane. — Helps with the damp. I’ve got a good batch.
— No, — she said.
He didn’t take it personally. In eight years of living next door, Frank had long since learned that Eleanor’s “no” meant exactly that. No subtext. No discussion.
They talked about the weather. Frank said rain would come by Friday. Eleanor said Saturday. Both of them looked in different directions, like two people who had plenty they could say but had long ago agreed to stick to weather and leave it at that.
Frank shuffled on. Eleanor watched him place the cane with the careful focus of a man crossing ice. She thought: if he falls out there past the field, I won’t know right away. Maybe three hours before I notice. The thought didn’t scare her or upset her. It just passed through her mind the way a cloud shadow passes over grass: there, then gone.
On Wednesday, Mike didn’t call. Eleanor didn’t notice in the morning or even after lunch. She noticed while washing dishes after supper, when she glanced automatically at the phone. The screen was dark on the corner of the table beside the breadbox.
Mike usually called around seven on Wednesdays. She didn’t wait for the call exactly. She just knew it was part of the week, the way you know the schedule of a bus you only take once a month. She didn’t pick up the phone. More precisely, she didn’t reach for it. The rule was old and familiar, like Walter’s slippers: don’t call first. Where that rule had come from, Eleanor couldn’t have said. It was just how things had settled.
She plugged the phone in to charge. Next to it, in a homemade cardboard frame, stood a school picture of Daniel at about ten years old: white shirt, serious face, looking straight into the camera. No other photos were out. Eleanor straightened the frame, though it was already straight.
Buckwheat. Tea. Bread. The radio station from town: news at six, then some talk show with a cheerful host asking questions and a guest answering confidently, and the host agreeing, and Eleanor listening to none of it. She didn’t turn on the radio to hear anything in particular. She turned it on so the room would contain some sound that wasn’t made by her.
She knitted socks, the third pair that winter. For whom, she hadn’t decided. Maybe Mike. Maybe Daniel. Or maybe they’d sit in the dresser until the next visit, whenever that happened to be.
At 9:30 she turned off the radio and made her usual round through the house. Two locks on the front door, the bolt, check the kitchen window. The routine took exactly three minutes and had not changed in eight years.
She went to bed. The darkness settled all at once. There were no streetlights in the hollow, and at night the windows were black, like holes cut into the walls. Eleanor closed her eyes. The silence was complete, without a crack in it. She called that peace.
Wednesday morning the fog was thicker than usual. Damp had rolled in from the field overnight, and the whole place sat in a pale white blur where you couldn’t even make out the neighbor’s roof, only a dark shape where it ought to be…
