The rain came back at three, heavy and windless and deliberate, and Daniel stood in the laundromat doorway making a list of everything he couldn’t do anything about.
The rain was first.
The hum was second.
It had been holding an unfinished sentence since yesterday afternoon and it hadn’t let go of it once, and he could feel the hold at the base of his throat whenever he swallowed.
Ruby came up the sidewalk with the red streak in her hair pasted flat to her cheek and ducked in under the awning beside him, shaking her sleeves out.
“You stand in doorways a lot.” “Do I.” “Twice in two days.
That’s either very dramatic or very unemployed.” “Day off.” “Nobody at the cannery gets a day off.” She wrung out her hood.
“Granny says that foreman works them like sled dogs.
What’d you do, break something?” Daniel looked at his hands.
They were still sore in the exact places that four hours of sealing applesauce lids leaves a man sore.
“Nothing I can prove.” Ruby laughed, short and sharp and unguarded, and under his sternum the hum came up at the sound of it.
Not threat.
Recognition.
It knew what she was, a wolf who had never once been told, and it was adding her to whatever it was building.
“You know what your problem is,” Ruby said.
“Tell me.” “Everybody in this town is strange the same way.
Same jokes, same complaints, same day, over and over, and it’s fine, you stop hearing it.” She pointed the wrung hood at him.
“You’re strange in a different direction.
I haven’t worked out which one yet.” “Let me know when you do.” “Oh, I will.” She wiped rain off her face with the back of her wrist.
“Can I ask you something stupid?” “Go ahead.” “When’s the last time anything happened here?
Anything.
A fire, a wedding, somebody moving in.” Daniel thought about it and had nothing, and the nothing was hers, not his.
“You tell me.” “That’s the stupid part.
I can’t get to one.” She said it lightly and it didn’t come out light.
“I’ve got a whole memory of a whole life and when I go looking for one day in it that wasn’t a Tuesday, there’s nothing on the shelf.” “Maybe you’re not looking hard.” “Maybe I’ve got twenty-eight years of not looking hard.” Ruby shook her head at herself and laughed it off, and the laugh took.
“God.
Listen to me.
I’ll come find you.” She pulled the hood on and stepped back into the rain.
“See you at the diner, Dan.
Tip better next time.” She was gone before he could put anything after that.
The hum tracked her all the way to the corner with a low note of interest, a contract engine marking where a possible second party was standing.
At three-fifteen Mrs.
Hennessey came out of the post office with a package in brown paper and no umbrella.
She checked the sky.
She checked the street.
She started walking, and her hip was bad in the honest way of an old woman who had earned the limp and never once brought it up, and her door was six blocks off, and the rain was about to double.
Daniel crossed the road.
His feet went first and the rest of him caught up two steps in, and by then she’d already spotted him.
“Dan.” She said his name like a piece of weather.
“You’re going to get soaked.
Again.” “You forgot your umbrella.” She looked at her own hands as if one might have turned up in them.
“I forgot my umbrella.
I do that.” She shifted the package to her other arm.
“My show’s at four.
I always make my show.” “Six blocks.” “Six blocks and a hip.
I know what’s in front of me, young man, I’ve done it before.” “In this?” “In worse.” She started off.
She got four steps and her breath was already going short.
The hum had gone very still, the whole of its attention pointed at him.
Daniel looked at the rain, and at the hill of her shoulders, and at the six blocks.
“I’d like,” he said.
The pressure came up under his ribs, lifted and ready, a space with a word missing out of it.
He thought about rain.
He thought about the gap between a cloud and a sidewalk as a thing two parties could agree on.
“I’d like the rain to hold off,” he said, low.
“One hour.
Just this street.” He didn’t put his hand out.
The deal wasn’t with her.
It was with the air, with the hum, with the thing that had been standing over an open sentence since yesterday, and he closed the sentence, and it took it.
The rain held.
It didn’t stop.
It was still up there, still coming down two streets over, still drumming the post office roof behind them.
It just wasn’t landing here, not on these six blocks, not on the strip of sidewalk between her and her front door.
Mrs.
Hennessey put her face up into the not-falling rain.
“Well,” she said.
“That’s something.” “It’ll pass.” “They do.” She hitched the package.
“Are you walking with me or standing in it?” He walked with her.
She did not ask how.
She did not ask why.
She had lived in this town a long time and she had learned somewhere along the line not to interrogate the weather.
“My grandson thinks I should move into the ground floor,” she said, at the second block.
“There’s a unit by the bakery.
No stairs.” “What do you think?” “I think I’ve had those stairs thirty years and I’ll have them another thirty.” She glanced sideways at him.
“Don’t tell him I got winded.” “I’ve got nothing to tell him.
I don’t know him.” “You know him.
He was two years behind you at school.” Daniel’s mouth said, “Right, of course,” and Daniel’s spine went cold, and neither of those two things had consulted each other.
“That’s what I thought,” she said.
“Nobody in this town knows anybody.
Everybody just agrees they do.” He looked over at her.
She was watching the sidewalk for cracks, and she had said it like a line she had never once turned over.
“You believe that?” he said.
“I believe my show’s at four.” She smiled at the pavement.
“You get to be my age, you keep the things that run on time.” “What’s the show?” “The one at four.” “That’s not a title.” “It’s got a doctor in it,” she said, and frowned.
“There’s a hospital.
Somebody’s always coming out of a coma.” The frown deepened, then gave up on itself.
“It’s on at four.
That’s what I know about it, and I’ve watched it every day of my life.” “That’s a lot of episodes.” “That’s a lot of comas.” She laughed at her own joke, and the laugh was real, and it was the best sound Daniel had heard in four days.
At the fourth block the hip started to tell on her.
At the fifth she took his arm without asking and without apologizing, which he liked her enormously for, and the hum ran a low steady note the whole way, satisfied, a machine that had been fed.
At her door she let go and turned around.
“You’re a good one, Dan.
Whatever you are.” “Enjoy your show.” “I always do.
That’s the trouble with it.” She went inside.
Daniel got two blocks back toward the laundromat under a ceiling of water that refused to come down, and his left shoelace snapped.
Clean break, at the eyelet.
He stopped and looked at his own shoe, and the hum gave one note under his sternum, and the note was a receipt.
“You okay there?” The pharmacist was in his doorway with a broom, a short man with a bald spot and glasses sitting crooked on his nose, a face Daniel half knew off two seconds of a background shot in a life he used to have.
“Shoelace,” Daniel said.
“Broke.” “They do that.
It’s the wet.” He set the broom against the frame and came out.
“You’re Dan, right?
Over the laundromat.
Quiet guy.
Good tenant, I hear.” “You hear a lot.” “It’s a drugstore.
It’s mostly hearing.” He looked down at the shoe.
“You got a spare at home?” “No.” “I’ve got laces.
Black, brown.
White, if you don’t mind white on a work boot, which I’ve always said looks perfectly sharp and my wife says is a sin against fashion.” “Brown.” “Brown’s the coward’s choice, but it’s the right one.” He squinted up.
“You notice it’s not raining on us?” Daniel’s chest went tight.
“It’s raining on Main,” the pharmacist said, and pointed the broom handle down the block, where it plainly was.
“Not here.
Huh.” “Huh,” Daniel said.
“It’ll be doing something else in an hour,” the pharmacist said.
“It always is.
You can’t dress for a day here, you can only dress for the next twenty minutes.” “That’s a philosophy.” “That’s a drugstore.” He shrugged and headed back inside.
“Door’s open till six.
Brown.” Daniel stood there with a dead lace in his boot while the broom started up again behind the glass.
Everybody here was a witness.
That was the new thing, and it was worse than the old things.
The curse had handed all of them lives and opinions and a view of the street, and the lives were real enough to look up, and looking up was going to be a problem.
He didn’t check what the pharmacist was carrying.
He could have.
There was a pressure behind his eyes that had been building for two days, something almost through, and he kept his eyes on the sidewalk instead, because he had a suspicion about what he’d be shown and no interest in confirming it today.
He crouched and tucked the broken lace back into the boot.
A shoelace.
That was the price.
Small.
Nearly nothing.
Exactly the size a first bill has to be so that the second one reads as reasonable.
“Noted,” he said out loud.
The hum did not gloat.
It didn’t need to.
The hour ran out four blocks from home.
The sky let go all at once, a solid sheet of it, and he walked the four blocks through it with cold water down his collar and one boot loose on his foot, and he understood that he was a dealer now.
A very small dealer.
A dealer in held rain and broken laces.
A dealer who could not walk it back.
In the apartment he sat on the floor and wrote on the inside of the coat with the last of the pen.
Shoelace.
First price.
Mrs.
H home dry.
“Shoelace,” he read out loud.
“First price.” The hum thrummed once, and the note was the sound of a counterparty that had him on record.
⟦ THE LEDGER HE CANNOT READ ⟧ STRUCK: one hour of held rain, one street, for a woman walking home.
TAKEN: a shoelace.
Left boot.
It will not be replaced by this account.
STILL OWED, nothing.
The first entry closes clean.
They are meant to.
⟦ THE LEDGER CLOSES ⟧