Brett Kostick had called at ten past eight on Thursday, while Evan sat at a conference table in a Mercer bank between a seller who had brought her own pen and a buyer who had brought his mother, and Evan took it in the corridor. The lady of the house was standing in the door, Brett said, and she had been very polite. In twenty-two years in the trade he had never been sent away so politely, and he wanted it understood that he would be billing somebody. Evan told him he would take care of it and went back in and initialed nineteen pages. That night his wife had given him the reason in a dozen words without being asked, and he had not asked for a thirteenth, because asking would have told her how much it mattered.
On Friday he took a day, the first since June. He told Mara he would be at the desk in the back bedroom, which he did on Fridays anyway, and she left at a quarter past seven in her good coat with her lunch in a paper bag and kissed him at the door. He stood on the porch until her taillights turned at the corner, and across the street the upstairs door stayed shut. At ten minutes to eight, with nobody on Larch Street to see him do it, he went round to the garage.
The cabinet key lived on his own ring, behind the house key, a small flat one he had never used for anything else, and the doors opened on the sound of a good lock. On the floor of the cabinet, where he had set it himself on a hand truck fifteen months before, in another garage, was a banker's box with a lid lettered in his father's capitals, LARCH ST — PERSONAL. He carried it to the bench and sat on his father's stool and put both hands on the lid.
He had told himself it was to learn what he had to protect. He had told himself, since Tuesday, that a man whose garage held the one exhibit the county had lost was entitled to know what else it held. His thumb knuckle cracked against the cardboard, once, twice.
He took the lid off. His father had packed it as he had built things, so that every piece had its place and nothing could shift in a truck, and everything lay under sheets of old yellow tissue, folded and refolded until it had gone soft as cloth, with a notebook at the front.
It was a detective's memo book, three inches by five, wire-bound across the top, with a black vinyl cover gone soft and gray at the corners from a pocket, and a rubber band around it had dried and stuck. He had last held it at fifteen, on an upturned bucket in the garage on Cutler Avenue, on a Sunday afternoon in October while his father was at church. He had gone straight to the Saturday he had spent in the truck, and a little past it, and understood about half of what he read, and he had put it back under its tissue and gone into the kitchen and made himself a sandwich and eaten it.
He lifted off the band, and it broke in his fingers.
The pages were dated down the margin in his father's pencil, the flat black stroke of a man who sharpened with a knife: September thirtieth, October third, and on, with times, and the initials of the adults in each room, and letters for everyone else. His father had used letters even here, A, B, A's mother, as if a name were evidence he meant to keep out of his own pocket. He turned to the nineteenth and stopped.
It was a Saturday, and the entry ran to two pages, and he had sat in a truck for six hours of the day it described. The times ran down the left, 0900 arr. — Ferrante, Rudnick, Sobczak, Vance, and beside them, in his father's clipped shorthand, what had been done and by whom. Base at E wall, low: painted panel, kids' — prime w/ rest. Saw started E wall, plaster + lath off to 5 ft. Chase, brick, studs at 24. Floor up, fir, joists orig. Vent opening cellar, broke back, framed. Bulb in cellar dead, swapped. Lunch 1215, trucks. He read the list once and found nothing in it that surprised him. Then he read on down the second page to the foot, to his father's initials and a time.
He read the entry through once, as he had at fifteen, and put the notebook down on the bench and looked at his hands.
He turned to the thirtieth of October, which he remembered the way he remembered a street he had once been lost in. It took only a moment to find.
Szabo — photos go in as condition. Search log is work product. Don't volunteer.
The pencil pressed hard. The last word had gone through the page, so that when he ran his thumb over the back he could feel it, a small ridge, in a stroke that had not hesitated.
He closed the book and turned back the tissue. A bundle of flat glassine sleeves lay along one side, a dozen or so, tied with cotton tape. The top one was lettered in the corner in his father's capitals with a single letter and a number and no name. He looked for a name and found none. It said A-2.
He slid it out of the tape onto the bench and held it to the window.
A child's crayon drawing of a house. A red roof, a yellow sun in the top corner with its rays drawn round and round. A row of small oblongs along the bottom that might have been beds. And in the floor of the house, in gray pencil, laid over the crayon with a hard, straight edge, a square with an arrow through it. Beside the square someone had printed a word in capitals. He read the first letter, a D, and stopped. It was lettered as a draftsman letters a plat, square and even, for a stranger to read. The clerk's voice was in his ear. Thirty-one. Kid's drawing. He slid the sleeve back where it had lain.
Beside it three videocassettes stood on their spines like books, in black plastic sleeves, each lettered by hand. A-1. A-2. A-3 MASTER.
He had not owned a machine that could play a videotape in seventeen years. He took out the last of them anyway and turned it over in his hands. The label was in his father's capitals, in carpenter's pencil, pressed hard enough that the paper had taken the shape of every stroke. The cassette weighed what any cassette weighs. Through the window in its face the tape lay wound on the right-hand reel, run to the end and left there. He read the label again for a date, and there was no date. He set it back on its spine, square to the other two.
A was a letter. Somebody's child, one of eleven, and nothing in the box said whose.
The garage was very quiet, except that a car went by on Larch Street and one of the steel doors of the cabinet, which he had left open, ticked in the cooling air.
What he came back to, in the end, with the notebook on his knee, was that his father had kept it. A match would have ended all of it: the log, with Don't volunteer in it; the master tape; the drawing that had walked out of the county's exhibit room. His father could have burned them in a barrel behind the garage on any evening of thirty years. Instead he had wrapped them in tissue and boxed them and put the box into his son's hands in a truck. Take the box, Evvie.
The notebook could not stay where it was. He decided that before he had got up off the stool. Mara had not gone through the cabinet, since she did not force locks, but she had looked at it on a Saturday afternoon for as long as she would have looked at an unsigned page, and she had let it go, and she would not let it go forever. When she opened it she would find the tapes and the drawing. The notebook carried his father's dates, and his initials, and Don't volunteer, and his own account of a Saturday, and a woman who could read the pressure of a pen through the back of a page would read it before he had finished explaining it. He put the notebook in a plastic bag from the kitchen and wrapped the bag in a shop towel. Then he walked out to the truck and laid the bundle under the driver's seat, flat, where his hand went in the dark.
The drawing he left, and the tapes, which carried letters and no names. A box of letters could not hurt anyone. That was what letters were for. He drew the tissue back over what was left and saw that it had kept the shape of what he had taken, a low pale rectangle, like a bed someone has just got out of. He smoothed it, and it came back. He put the lid on, and the box in the cabinet, and closed the doors, and turned the key, and tried the handle twice.
On Saturday morning the oak in the Linden House lot had turned, and his father's window was full of it, orange going brown.
His father sat in his chair with the cardigan buttoned right for once. Evan had left his father's ring in the truck. He sat on the edge of the bed and waited until his father's eyes came round to him.
"Dad. Why did you keep it all?"
His father looked at the window, where the oak was. "Till it's needed," he said, to the glass.
Evan waited, and nothing else came. Somewhere in the corridor a cart went by with a plate rattling on it.
"Mara's started at the university," he said. "At the lab. She likes it."
"You look after her," his father said, to the window.
"I do."
His father turned then, and his pale eyes rested on Evan's face. "You look after her." He said it again, more slowly, as if setting it on a shelf. "Somebody has to."
Nora called at ten to six on Saturday evening.
He was in the workshop, standing at the bench, with nothing in front of him. He saw the name on the screen and let it ring three times before he answered in the voice he used for her.
"Sweetheart." She sounded warm and a little tired, as she always did in the evenings, when she had been a public person all day. "I want to ask you something, and I'd like you to hear the whole of it before you say anything. Will you?"
"Go ahead."
"I want to buy your half."
He said nothing, and she went on.
"Of the house. Not the whole house, I'd never. Your half." She spoke in the voice she used for the difficult part of a talk with a family: unhurried, very gentle, every clause set down like a cup on a saucer. "Sweetheart, I've been thinking about your father, and I've been thinking about that place in Mercer, and what it costs, and I did some arithmetic. His money runs out in April. You know that it does."
"Who told you April?"
"Nobody had to tell me, I've been doing this for thirty years, I can add." A soft laugh. "Don't be cross. I want to do it properly. A hundred and eighty-five thousand dollars. My lawyer says it's a quitclaim, ten minutes at a notary's, into the Frain Family Trust. It would carry Lee past the spring and well beyond. Mara and I would own it together, mother and daughter, which is what I always wanted anyhow, and you'd be free of it, Evan. You'd be free of the whole business. Lee's bills, that house, all of it."
He looked at the bench. It had a thin film of sawdust on it that he had not wiped, and he put his finger in it and drew a line.
Evan knew what a quitclaim did. He could have drafted it in his sleep, and some nights had. It severed the joint tenancy and made Nora Frain, as trustee, a record owner of an undivided half. And a record owner was one of the people whose written, notarized consent the court wanted by five o'clock on the twenty-third of October. He could not tell whether she understood that. He could not tell whether the kindest woman he knew had put the shape of a veto into an offer of money without seeing it, or had seen it and not minded. He could hold both. The holding cost him about the same either way.
"I'll think about it," he said.
"That's all I ask." Warm again, relieved. "I'd like to raise it with her myself, when the time is right. Give her a kiss for me. Tell Lee I said he's a stubborn old goat."
"I'll tell him."
"There's my sweetheart. Sleep on it."
The line went dead, and he stood with the phone against his ear longer than the silence required.
Then he took the shop rag from its nail and wiped the bench. He cleared the film of sawdust in long strokes from one end to the other, and then the vise, and then the top of the steel cabinet, and the side door opened.
"Grapes." Mara came in with a paper sack held against her chest and the cold on her coat. "Concords, the real ones. There's a man at the market who says he's never sprayed anything in his life. Try one."
She put it into his mouth, and it burst, sour-sweet, with the skin gone bitter on his tongue. She had been out since ten. Her cheeks were pink and her hair had come loose on one side, and she was humming something with no beginning, a tune she had picked up off a stall or a radio and would not have been able to name. She looked like someone who had been let off for a day, and had spent it well.
She set the sack on the bench and laid her hand on his shoulder and left it there.
He looked at it: a small hand, the fingers short, a burn scar white at the base of the thumb. It lay on the gray cotton of his shirt lightly, as if he were something that might spill. He thought of the steel cabinet in the corner behind her, and in it, under tissue, a red roof drawn in crayon, and a gray square someone had laid over it with a straight edge.