Hollis Truitt kept the log in spiral notebooks from the CVS out on Sunburst Highway, and by the end there were four of them, rubber-banded together in the drawer under the telephone. Time, dose, and what she had eaten if she had eaten. He wrote down when the aide arrived and when the aide left. He wrote down the day the oxygen company sent a man out to swap the concentrator and the man tracked mud across the good floor, and he wrote down what time the man left, too, though there was nobody to show it to and no place to send it.
The house sat on nine acres off Griffith Neck Road that had been eleven acres when his father bought it. Two of them had gone back to the marsh in the years since, and the loblollies at the low end stood in the water dead and barkless and gray, forty or fifty of them, holding their shape long after they had quit being trees. Everybody down there had them. You could stand on the shoulder of any road in Dorchester County and see a stand of pines dying that way, upright, orderly, the salt coming up through the roots of them, and the land going out from under a family an acre at a time with nobody to be angry at about it. Out on 50 the Baltimore traffic ran east all summer, four lanes of it, coolers in the back seats, ninety minutes to the ocean and not one of them stopping for anything but gas.
Fay had worked twenty-six years in the Register of Wills office in Cambridge and she knew what everybody in that county was worth and what everybody’s mother had left to who, and she had never once said a word about any of it, not at church and not at the table and not to Hollis. He had thought that was one of the finest things about her. He said so at the funeral. It got a laugh, and then it did not, and that was about the shape of the whole day.
She got sick in the fall of the year and it took her twenty-two months. Hollis retired out of refrigeration maintenance at the plant in Hurlock with fourteen months to go on his own clock and did not talk about that either. He learned the pumps and the ports and how to turn a woman who weighed ninety-one pounds without hurting her, and he was good at it, better than the aide, and he knew he was better than the aide.
The aide was Dawnelle, twenty-four, out of Vienna, with a boyfriend who idled in the driveway. She was kind to Fay in a loud way that Hollis did not care for, calling her Miss Fay and honey and telling her about the boyfriend, and Fay liked her. On a Thursday in December Dawnelle gave the four o’clock a half hour early because she had somewhere to be, and Hollis said, in the room, in front of Fay, that the schedule was the schedule for a reason and that he had it written down if she wanted to see it. Dawnelle said yes sir. Fay looked at the ceiling. After the girl went out Fay said, “That wasn’t necessary,” and Hollis said the schedule was the schedule, and went to see about the storm door.
Renee came down from Delmar on Saturdays with a foil pan of something and stayed until dark. Ray came when Ray came.
It was the last week of January, one of those flat white afternoons where the sky sits on the field and the light never changes from nine in the morning until it quits. Fay had been off solid food eleven days. She had asked for Ray twice that week, and Ray had not come either time, and Hollis had told her he was on his way, which he was not, and she had known it.
Hollis was fitting the tray table over the bed rail and it would not seat right, the way it had not seated right since October, and he was working at it, and he said, not especially to her, “Two years in this house and there ain’t a soul come through that door and asked me how I was making out. Not the church, not your sister. Not one.”
Fay had her eyes closed. She was quiet long enough that he thought she had gone off, the way she did.
Then she said, “You could have had somebody.”
Hollis stopped with the tray.
“I always figured you did,” she said. Her voice was down in her chest by then and it took a lot out of her to get anything up out of it, and she did not open her eyes. “It wouldn’t have killed me. I’d have got the afternoons.”
He stood there holding the tray table with both hands.
“Fay.”
“Move that fan,” she said. “It’s on my neck.”
He moved the fan. He got the tray seated on the third try. She took two spoons of the vanilla and would not take a third, and she slept, and he sat in the chair by the window with the notebook on his knee and did not write anything in it for a while and then wrote 4:15, 2 sp. vanilla, no lunch.
She lived twenty-six more days. He tried to get her back to it twice. The first time she said, “What?” and he said, “Nothing,” and gave her the pill. The second time she was not there for it at all. She talked to him that day about a boat her father had, and she was pleasant, and she called him Merle for a minute, who was her father, and then she came back and knew him and was tired.
She died on a Tuesday morning at twenty past six with Dawnelle in the room and Hollis in the kitchen putting the coffee on. He had not been out of that room more than ten minutes in three weeks and he was in the kitchen with the scoop in his hand when the girl called him, and by the time he got down the hall it was done. Dawnelle was crying. He said thank you and asked her to go on and call the hospice line, and after they took Fay out he found that the girl had washed the two cups in the sink and wiped the counter down, which she was not required to do, and had left, and he did not think about her again for a long time.
There was a road he took to get to Vienna that was three and a half miles longer than going up 331, and he had been taking it since 1994.
That was the winter the ice storm put the plant down for four days. The night it started, second shift got sent home at nine and the buses could not run the Neck roads, and the foreman came through the locker room asking who had four-wheel drive and who was going which way. Hollis had the F-150 and he was going toward Vienna. There were three of them in that truck. A boy named Wingate got out at the Exxon at Rhodesdale, and then it was Hollis and Janet Cropper off the deboning line, and he drove her the eleven miles to the trailer she had over behind the church at Reids Grove.
She was twenty-nine then and he was forty-one. They had never worked the same end of that building. He knew her the way you know somebody in a plant with six hundred people in it, which is to say he knew what she looked like walking to her car.
He remembered it a certain way. The heater running, the wipers doing nothing much, the sleet coming down through the yard light in front of the trailer. She had a hole in the knee of her jeans and she kept her hands over it. She said her husband was up at Poplar Hill doing eighteen months and she said what for, and Hollis said he was sorry to hear it. There was a good while where neither of them said anything and the truck ran. He remembered that she said, “You could come in a minute and get warm.” He remembered the exact way she said it and the way she was looking out the windshield when she said it and not at him.
He put his hand on the shifter and he said he had better get on before the bridge went.
She said all right. She said thank you for the ride, Hollis, and she went up the two cinder blocks that made her steps and in the door, and he waited until the light came on inside the way you do, and then he backed out and drove home to Fay, who was asleep, and he got in the bed and lay there until the alarm.
His father had told him a thing once, in the truck, in 1968 or thereabouts, about a man they both knew who had left his family and gone to Delaware. Hollis was thirteen. His father said a man is what he don’t do. He said it the way he said everything, looking at the road, and it is possible he was talking about money, because there was a lot of talk about money in that truck. Hollis had carried it fifty-some years. He had never said it out loud to anybody, and he had never once, in all that time, gone in a house he was not supposed to be in.
He had also driven the long way to Vienna since the first Reagan term was over, past the church at Reids Grove, past a lot where the trailer used to sit and had not sat since about 2003, and if you had asked him why he took that road he would have told you it was easier on the truck than 331 with the trucks on it, and he would not have been lying, exactly.
The funeral was at Zion on a Saturday in the middle of February with a wind coming off the river that got through everything. Good crowd. Fay had been in that church her whole life.
Ray came down from Denton with Barbara. Ray was sixty-eight and had a good coat on and he cried at the graveside where Hollis did not, and afterward at the fellowship hall Ray stood by the coffee urn for an hour and everybody who came in went to Ray first. That had been true since about 1961.
Ray had run a fence crew for thirty years and he had carried on with a woman out of Federalsburg for eleven of them, and Barbara had found out in 1990 and thrown him out and taken him back in six weeks. It was known. It had been known so long that it had stopped being anything, the way a scar stops being a wound, and Ray and Barbara went on a cruise ship every February out of Baltimore and sent everybody a picture of themselves at a dinner table in clothes they did not own.
The line came through. Hollis stood at the end of it and shook hands and said thank you for coming and heard about a hundred and forty times what a good woman Fay was, which he knew, and eleven or twelve times some version of what a good man he had been to her at the end, which he took in and held onto and turned over.
Janet Cropper came through the line at about a quarter after one.
He had not seen her in fifteen years. She had gotten heavy and her hair was short and gray at the front and she had a girl with her, grown, and he knew her before she said anything.
“Hollis,” she said, and she took his hand in both of hers. “I’m so sorry, honey.”
He said thank you for coming.
“I had to come,” she said. “You know Fay carried me to Salisbury twice a week the whole spring I was doing my treatments. Eleven weeks. Wouldn’t take gas money, wouldn’t take nothing. I asked her one time what I owed her and she said, don’t be ignorant.” Janet laughed and her eyes went. “Don’t be ignorant. That’s what she said to me.”
The girl with her said something about her mother talking about Miss Fay all the time.
Hollis said that sounded like her.
“It surely did,” Janet said, and she squeezed his hand and moved on down to where Renee was, and the next people came up, and they were Suttons from out at Church Creek, and they wanted to tell him about a hospital bed they had in their garage.
He drove home at four with the pans in the back seat. Renee stayed the night and went back to Delmar Sunday.
He did not know what spring. He went through it that night sitting in the chair, going year by year, the way you check a fuse box, and there was no spring he could put it in. There had never been a Tuesday and a Thursday for eleven weeks that he had noticed. Fay had worked at the courthouse until 2014 and there was no way to do it on a lunch hour. He got up twice and stood in the kitchen and then went back and sat down.
He waited eight days and then he made up the box.
He went through Fay’s dresser and her closet with the box on the bed. He put in a jar of buttons, and a set of tea towels that had never been out of the sleeve, and a little dish from Ocean City with a crab on it, and a scarf, and a hardback about the Hollands Island church that he was fairly sure Fay had never opened. None of it had been promised to anybody. Nobody had said a word about any of it.
In the bottom of the closet there was a shoebox with paid bills going back years, the way she kept them, and in among the bills there was a Christmas card. It was from 1998 and the front of it had a cardinal on a fence post. Inside it said Fay at the top and then four or five lines and then a letter at the bottom that was either a B or an R, in handwriting Hollis did not know. He read it twice. Then he put it back where it had been, and put the bills back on top of it, and put the lid on the shoebox and set it back on the shelf in the closet, and went on filling the box on the bed.
Janet lived in a single-story house off Crapo Road with a ramp on the front of it and a wind chime made out of forks. She came to the door and was surprised and glad, and he stood there with the box and said Fay had wanted her to have a few things.
She put her hand up over her mouth.
“Well, get in here,” she said.
The house was warm and close and smelled like a cooked breakfast. There was a boy of maybe five on the floor in front of the television that turned out to be her daughter’s, and Janet moved a laundry basket off the couch and made him sit, and made coffee he had not asked for and cut him a piece of a pound cake somebody from her church had brought over for something else entirely.
They talked about the plant. They talked about who had died. She had worked there another nine years after him and gone out on her back in 2011 and there had been a business with the disability that took two and a half years, and she told him all of it, and he said that was a shame, and she said, well.
He put his coffee down.
“You remember that ice storm,” he said. “Ninety-four.”
“Lord,” she said. “That was the one where they had the National Guard down here.”
“They sent second shift home at nine.”
“They sent us home a lot of nights that winter,” Janet said. “I don’t know how we got anywhere.”
“I carried you home,” Hollis said. “Out to Reids Grove.”
Janet said, “You did?” and looked into the middle of the room the way people do, and then she laughed a little. “You know what, I got carried home so many times that year. I didn’t have a car till ninety-six. Whoever was going out that way, I’d stand up front by the timeclock and holler out where I was going.”
The boy on the floor changed the channel.
Hollis turned his cup a quarter turn on the saucer.
“You had a hole in the knee of your jeans,” he said.
“I sure did,” she said, comfortably. “That was about all I had.”
He waited. She got up and got the pot and filled him back up without asking, and sat back down and pulled the housecoat over her knees, and said something about the cake.
“I set out there in that truck a good while,” Hollis said. “In front of your place.”
“Did you.”
“You asked me to come in.”
Janet Cropper looked at him.
She was not a stupid woman and she never had been. Whatever went across her face went across it fast and she put it away, and what she did then she did on purpose, and Hollis was never able to decide afterward what it had been made out of.
“Hollis,” she said, “I had a two-year-old and Darnell was up at Poplar Hill and it was nine degrees. I’d have asked the devil himself in if his truck had heat in it.” She reached over and put her hand flat on the back of his hand where it sat on his knee. “Honey, I asked everybody in. There wasn’t nothing to it. There wasn’t never anything in this world to it.”
Hollis sat there with her hand on his hand.
“You come by anytime you want,” she said. “You hear me? A person shouldn’t sit in a house by theirself.”
He stayed forty more minutes. He had a second piece of the pound cake. He asked about the ramp and she told him about her hip and he told her what to put on the bottom of it so the water would not stand there, and she said she would tell her son-in-law, and when he got up to go she hugged him at the door and said it again, anytime, and he said all right.
He got in the truck and sat in her driveway for a minute with his hands on the wheel and did not start it. Then he started it and went home the long way, which from Crapo is not the long way to anywhere, it is just longer.
Renee came Saturday with a ham. She had brought a ham the week before too.
She ran the vacuum in the front room, which did not need it, and she went through the refrigerator and threw out four things, and she asked him twice about the taxes on the nine acres and he said he was handling it. They ate at five. She talked about her husband’s shoulder and about the girls, and Hollis said the right things at the right places.
She got up and started the dishes with her back to him, running the water hot, and said over her shoulder, “You been getting out any?”
“Some.”
“Daddy.”
“I been out.”
“Aunt Barb said you ought to come up to them for Easter.”
“We’ll see about Easter.”
She washed the pan. Out past the window the field was going blue and the pines stood at the low end of it in the water where they had been standing since before Renee was born.
“Your mother thought I had somebody,” Hollis said.
The water ran.
Renee turned the tap down and stood there with the sponge in her hand. She did not turn around all the way. She was thirty-nine years old and she had been in that kitchen her whole life.
“When did she say that?”
“January.”
“January she was on a lot of stuff, Daddy.”
“She knew what she was saying.”
Renee turned around then and leaned back against the sink with her arms folded and the sponge still in her hand, dripping on the floor, and she looked at him for a while.
“Did you?” she said.
Hollis picked up his fork and set it down on the plate so it laid flat.
“It was a long time ago,” he said.
Something moved in her face and settled, and she looked down at the floor, and then she nodded once, slow, and said, “Okay.”
“Renee.”
“No. Okay.” She turned back around to the sink. “I don’t need to know all that.”
She finished the dishes. She wrapped the ham in foil and put it in the refrigerator and got her pocketbook and kissed the top of his head on her way by, which she had done since she was fourteen, and told him to call her when he got the tax business straightened out.
He heard her car go down the lane. He sat at the table while the field went from blue to nothing, and the pines went with it, and he did not get up to put the light on for a good while, and he let it stand.
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