She mixed the fill three times before it was wrong enough.
The first batch matched the wall. That was the trouble. The paint in the front bedroom had gone the yellow-cream of old piano keys under forty years of lamps. Joint compound stirred with a pinch of raw umber came up to it exactly, and would have vanished. She scraped it back into the bucket. The second was too gray. The third, a shade lighter and a hair cooler than the plaster around it, she laid on the board with a nine-inch knife and stood back from.
From the doorway it was wall. From a foot away it was a repair, with an edge you could follow with a finger, two feet wide and four tall. Snow had been coming down since noon, and the window gave a flat white light that hid nothing. The compound needed forty minutes to skin and a day to cure. After that she would glaze it with the wall's own paint, thinned and warmed with a drop of ochre, so that it would age as the wall aged, a season behind.
The door stayed as it was. It was behind a sheet of clear acrylic now, held off the paint on four nylon standoffs, and the plate was screwed back over the gas stub with its own screw. She had not touched a brush to the gouge down its left side. Pinned beside it was a card in her own pencil: Painted by V. Teague, 1992. Overpainted, Oct. 1996. Pried, Oct. 2026. Not restored. Under a raking light the arch still stood up out of the film.
Her phone buzzed on the windowsill at half past three. She peeled a glove with her teeth and answered with compound drying on her knuckles.
"It's on the weather that you're getting six inches," her mother said.
"It's been coming down since noon."
A pause, a sip of something. Behind her a radio was playing low. "I read what the judge said."
"I thought you might."
"I'm not going to tell you I was wrong." Nora's voice was even, and it had been sanded. "I've tried. I stand in the kitchen and try it out loud, and it won't come out of my mouth."
"I'm not asking you to."
"Then what are you doing?"
Mara looked at the wet edge on the wall. "Working."
"They asked me to step down. At Small Voices. I told them I'd written the letter already." Her mother laughed a little, at the end of it, and stopped. "If I say it, Mara, then what was it for? Those years. That march. I'd have nothing. Do you understand? I'd have nothing at all."
"I understand that."
"But you're not going to say it's all right."
"No."
The radio played on. Neither of them hung up.
"Well," Nora said. "It's snowing there. Put salt on the steps." Then, lower, in the voice from the porch with the cocoa: "I love you, Libby."
She had said it on Christmas Day, for four minutes, and Mara had not corrected her. She did not now.
"Salt's in the cellar," she said. "I'll do it."
Evan came in from a job at four, smelling of cold and sawdust, with a pencil behind his ear. He had framed the opening back in December and hung the new drywall himself, true to a sixteenth. He looked at it from the doorway.
"I can't see it."
"Come here."
He crossed the room and put his face a foot from the wall. He found the edge with his eye, and then with his thumb, and followed it down as his father would have followed a stud. He took his hand away without a word, and left a clean print in the dust of her sanding.
"Wash," she said. "Then come upstairs."
The workroom was under the slope of the roof, and the hook Evan had screwed into the frame in August hung open in its eye. She took an archival box down from the top shelf and set it on the bench between the lamp and the loupe, and lifted the lid.
They lay in clear polyester sleeves, in the order she had put them away. The class photograph, in its folder of buffered board. Her own check for sixty thousand dollars, mailed to Ellsworth in November, which had come back in an envelope torn neatly in half. The quitclaim, folded once across the signature line, unsigned, with a gray thumb-sized smear at the lower corner.
She had looked at the photograph once, standing at the hall table with her coat on: eleven children on five steps in bright spring light, and a name in ballpoint on the back. Libby S., third from the left. It was a small face, turned a little away. Nothing came. She had checked the steps instead. They were the same five steps, one of them rebuilt. A record. It went where the records went.
"You kept it," Evan said. He was looking at the deed.
"I didn't clean it." She turned the sleeve to the lamp. "You can lift ash off. You can't put it back."
He did not touch it. He put his hands in his back pockets and took them out again.
"By the margin," she said. "Only the margin."
He took it between thumb and forefinger, on the white edge, and the paper shook a very little. It weighed nothing.
"I'd do it again," he said. "That's the part I can't say to Frances. I'd put it in the fire again, for him. I'm sorry for what it cost you, and I'd do it."
"I know you would." She had known it in the alley, with the phone at her ear. "I'm not asking you to stop being his son," she said. "I'm asking you not to decide what I can stand to have in the house."
He looked at the smear. "Ask me anything. The question and the one you mean. I've got a lifetime of answering the one you asked."
"What was the last line?"
"Crawl eighteen in to grade. Test pit four feet." He stopped, and said the rest flat, as he had said it to Wendt. "Nothing. One-forty."
She took the sleeve back, by its margin, and laid it in the tray. Then she lifted the dust off his cheekbone with the side of her thumb, and he stood very still for it, like a man being measured.
Everything else had a date on it. Judge Szymanski had granted the certificate on Tuesday the twelfth of January, in nine minutes, and read the words did not commit from the bench, and Mara had sat in the second row. Leland had died on the nineteenth of November, in the morning, with Evan there. Evan had pleaded to a misdemeanor for the notebook, a fine and a year of probation, and Cardinal Title had let him go. Now he did finish carpentry for a man in Averill who paid cash, which had been his father's first trade. In December he had begun, again, to sleep facing her.
At six there was a knock.
The bell worked. Evan had fixed it in November. Mara went down the hall drying her hands on her jeans and opened the red door on the cold.
Vera stood on the mat in a black wool coat with snow on the shoulders and a pie in both hands, in a glass dish with a dish towel tucked round it. The braid was pinned flat at the nape. She had crossed the street in it. She had put on lipstick, and it had come off a little on the collar of her scarf. Behind her, on the sidewalk, her footprints went back across the road, filling.
"I used to live here," she said.
"Come in."
She stamped her boots on the mat, twice, as a guest does. Then she came over the threshold, in the shallow trough of the oak, and Mara took the pie.
In the hall she stood a moment with her coat still on. She looked at the runner, and up at the fanlight, and once at the brass flap in the front door. Then she looked away from it, and Mara took her coat.
Evan had made a chicken. He had made it badly and carried it in with great seriousness, and Vera ate two helpings, which was the kindest thing anyone did that night. They talked about the roads. They talked about Agnes, who had turned eighty-nine in December and put on a paper crown for it and would not take it off for her nap. Vera said the piano was flat. Evan said he could do something about that, and she said, "Not the A," and he said, "Not the A," and it was almost a joke.
Later, passing the potatoes, Evan said, "You came to Mercer General. In November. You read to him."
Vera looked up. "You asked me."
"I did."
"He slept through most of the Trollope." She took a potato. "I read it anyway."
Mara waited until the pie. She cut it herself.
"Has Danny answered?"
Vera set down her fork. "No."
She did not dress it up. She sat with her hands on either side of the plate, small, upright, in the good gray cardigan, and told it as she'd have entered an item in the hardware store's books. On the thirteenth she had sent him a copy of the certificate, overnight, signature required, with a photograph of the door that Salo had taken at cot height, the scale bar in it. On Thursday the tracking page had shown a signature. D. Teague, in the scrawl a carrier's pad makes of a name, the T crossed hard.
"He signed for it," she said. "That's what I have."
Nobody said anything. Evan looked at his plate. Vera glanced at him once, without unkindness, and away.
"He was five when I painted it," Vera said. "He chose the gold for the knob. He said a mouse wouldn't want silver." She lifted her fork again. "He said when a court says it. A court said it Tuesday. I don't know what he's waiting for. I've stopped drawing up the list."
"He might—"
"He might."
That was all. Mara cut a second slice for her and Vera took it.
After dinner Vera went into the living room without being asked and sat at the piano and lifted the lid. Mara stood in the kitchen doorway with the dish towel. The piece was slow and plain, a tune you could have hummed, and she played it through once with her back very straight. The A came up under her finger and stuck. She lifted it with a nail, and went on. At the next one she played the D above it instead. At the third she left it out altogether and let the tune go by without it.
The gap stayed in the melody, small and exact, like a tooth.
Mara washed and Evan dried. It was how they had done it since Carrick. The window over the sink had gone blue, then black, and the snow came down across the yard light in long slow diagonals.
"Would you have picked me?" he said.
She kept her hands in the water.
"If they hadn't put us at that lake. If it had been anybody's cookout." He was drying the pie dish, slowly, on the inside of the rim. "I've thought about it since October. I keep coming up with nothing I can prove."
She thought about it. She thought about a picnic table and a sunburn on one arm, and a hard g in gesso, and how her plate had gone over in the grass, and none of it proved anything but a good afternoon.
"I don't know," she said. "I don't have a record of that."
He went on drying the dish. The water ran. In the next room Vera had gone back to the beginning of the tune and was playing it again, around the A.
Mara took her hands out of the sink. The dishwater had been hot, and for once her hands were warm. She dried one on her jeans, and put it over the back of his, on the counter, where it stayed. It was short-fingered, and there was a burn scar on the thumb. He looked at it for a while.
He put the towel down without folding it.
Vera left at ten, with her boots on and her scarf tied twice. "The pie dish was my mother's," she said at the door. "Bring it back when it's clean."
By then the snow was three inches on the porch rail and still coming. Evan walked her home across Larch Street with his arm out for her elbow and her hand refusing it, the two of them small under the streetlight. Mara stood in the doorway until the outside staircase took Vera up and a light came on in the window above it.
The steps would ice. The bag of rock salt was in the cellar, under the stairs.
She took the kitchen stairs down. The forty-watt bulb hung where it had always hung, and she found the string in the dark without looking. The furnace ran. The cold came off the fieldstone in a slow, even breath, and she lifted the bag of rock salt onto her hip.
The plank door in the front wall stood open on the dark, as it had since the twenty-seventh of October. On its hasp the padlock hung open.