He stood there breathing the cold, wet air and caught himself thinking something unexpected. It was quiet here. Not dead quiet—living quiet. The kind in which things are happening, just not in a hurry. In D.C. he couldn’t remember the last time he had simply stood still and done nothing.
Mrs. Parker fed him breakfast again. Over the meal she mentioned that the mechanic had called the night before and confirmed he’d arrive around noon. Alex nodded. So he could leave by evening. That was a concrete point on the timeline, and he instinctively grabbed onto it. But there were still several hours until noon.
Around ten he went back to his mother’s house to inspect what he hadn’t gotten to the day before. Kate opened the door, let him in, and said she and Lily were heading to Mrs. Parker’s. Mrs. Parker had promised to show Lily how to make hand pies.
“You don’t have to leave because of me,” he said.
“We’re not leaving because of you.” Kate pulled Lily’s hat down over her ears. “Lily’s been waiting all week for those pies.”
“I’ve been waiting a very long time,” Lily confirmed solemnly.
They left. Alex stayed in the house alone. He moved through the rooms slowly. Not like an inspector with a notebook—without the notebook now, without notes. Just walked and looked. Touched things carefully, as if they might break. The china cabinet. A stack of books on the windowsill, well-thumbed, with scraps of paper marking pages. A framed set of photographs on the wall. Himself at ten, in a school picture, serious-faced. His mother young and pretty, laughing. Some summer day by the river, him standing knee-deep in water holding a fish and looking absurdly proud. He didn’t remember the day. The photograph did.
On the kitchen windowsill stood two pots with dead plants in them. His mother had loved houseplants. They hadn’t survived her. He stood in front of them for a while, then picked up both pots and carried them out to the porch. He wasn’t sure why.
In the pantry off the kitchen he found tools, old ones, in a wooden box. Hammer, nails in a coffee tin, chisel, hand plane. Rusted, but usable. He took the hammer, found nails that would work, and went to fix the sunken floorboard in the hall. Worked in silence. It took about twenty minutes. Then he found a scrap of board in the shed that fit well enough and went to work on the fence by the garden.
Physical work had always calmed him. He had known that about himself for years. In difficult times he preferred doing something with his hands—didn’t matter what, as long as it was concrete and produced a visible result.
Kate came back around noon, alone, without Lily. Lily had stayed with Mrs. Parker to help with a second tray of pies. Kate stepped into the yard and saw Alex at the fence, coat unbuttoned, hammer in hand. She stopped.
“You’re fixing the fence.”
“Needed fixing.”
She was quiet for a second, then brought a second stool from the porch, set it near the one holding the tools, and sat down. She didn’t leave, didn’t pretend not to notice. Just sat and watched him work.
Ten minutes later he finished one section of fence, set down the hammer, and sat on the porch step across from her. Took a drink of water from a bottle in his pocket.
“How long have you been gone from D.C.?” he asked.
“Eight months. Since February.”
“And in eight months you never wanted to go back?”
Kate thought before answering. He noticed that about her too—she thought before she spoke, didn’t rush to fill silence with the first thing available.
“Back to D.C.? No. Back home? Yes. Only I don’t have what I used to call home anymore. The apartment was his. The job was good, but I quit a year before I left. He explained that it interfered with family life.” She gave a small, humorless smile. “I agreed at the time. Now I can’t understand how I ever did. When you hear the same thing long enough, you start treating it like fact.” She looked at him with mild curiosity. “Do you understand how that works?”
“I’m in construction,” he said. “I work with people who know how to apply pressure. Different methods, same result.”
Kate nodded.
They sat in silence for a while, but not as tensely as the day before. By then the fog had mostly lifted, and the field beyond the garden was visible again, rust-colored with a strip of woods on the horizon.
“Alex,” Kate said. “Can I ask about your mother?”
