The rain was done.
Morning came up dry and white over an ordinary water, and the town came down off the hill, the church emptying behind them the way a church empties when there is nothing left to ask for.
The water had left its mark on everything.
Mud to the sills of the store.
The saloon’s sign hanging by one nail.
A drowned chair from somebody’s parlor had been set upright in the middle of the street, still waiting for the room it belonged to.
The town moved through it gently, the way you move through a room after a death, not counting yet.
The storekeeper opened his shutters and stood in the doorway, looking at the water’s new edge a long moment before he went back inside.
The barber swept mud.
The women who had spent the night on the hill hung wet cloth over the rail, and it steamed in the sun.
Eli went down to the strand.
The flat rock stood where it had stood, wet and bare.
The row was gone: buttons, lace, cloth, the pin, the stud, the ring, the boot, and the glove that had closed it, carried out with the water, the way stock goes somewhere when a shop shuts.
Nora stood at the rock before him.
She did not look at it long.
She opened the ledger to the left page and ran her finger down the entries, dated, every one, and closed it.
“They were paid,” she said.
“Paid things leave. That is what paid means.”
The water was still going out, a plain water finding its level and done, and the last of it was drawing off the flats into the basin, leaving pools that held the sky.
He stood at the edge of it and watched the shallows, and she came out of them as the water went.
Walking, the way she had walked in.
One boot and one bare foot, the bare foot not minding the mud.
Where she set it down, the mud held the print.
Gray clothes the color of the lake’s floor, buttonholes empty, hair down and heavy.
She walked out of the water onto the dry and stopped, and stood the way a woman stands at the end of a long road, and looked at the town, at the mud, at the church on the hill, and there was nothing in her face that knew any of it.
The town on the strand went quiet.
Nobody said her name.
That was habit.
She looked at him a long time.
“Do I know you?” she said.
He knelt where he stood and picked up a length of wet rope the water had put back on the strand, and he looped it twice around the nearest post and tied it.
The dead hand took the rope and held, and he did not think about it, because he was not thinking about his hands at all.
He was thinking about the knot, the one he had tied for six years and then three more, the one she had known for three years and said she would know when she came up.
She watched his hands.
“You still tie it double,” she said.
“Yes.”
“I don’t remember you,” she said.
“I don’t remember six years, or three, or the road. But I know that knot. And I know I trusted you.” She said it plainly, the way she had always said the load-bearing things.
“That is the strangest thing I own.”
“It came back whole,” he said.
“What did?”
“Everything that was given.” He stood up.
“The day you set down, you gave to me. I have it carried. The why you set down—I had it kept dry, the way you asked, and it was never the water’s to keep. It was only mine, and now it is yours again.”
“Tell me,” she said.
And then, because it was the question she had asked at the close of every road for three years: “Why did I walk in?”
He told her.
Flat, the way you read a list, because the flatness was the only thing that would hold it.
He had gone over the telling of it on the road until the words were worn smooth as a step, and he gave them to her now the same way, one after another.
The man with the good memory who was not a man but the lake’s hand on two legs, come to see what it was following.
The thread.
The arithmetic.
One thread in the water, and the water holds still.
She had paid the footing for the whole road.
She listened with her head down, the way she checked a column.
When he was done she was quiet a long time, and then she said: “That is the shape of it.” She said it like a woman fitting a key she had carried a long time to a lock she had forgotten.
“I would know that anywhere. I would do it again.”
“You don’t owe me for it,” he said.
“I said I would not.”
“You don’t. You set it down. I picked it up. It is yours. There is no column for it.”
She looked at him a long time, at the man who had kept things dry for three years, and something crossed her face that in anyone else would have been a smile.
“And owning the why. That is a better settlement than I counted on.” She said it looking at the lake, and the lake said nothing back, having no column left to put her in.
Nora came down the strand with the ledger, and she did not speak first.
She opened the book to the left page and held it out, and Mara looked at her own history the way you look at a house you built and rented out and are shown through after the tenant has gone—buttons, lace, cloth, the pin, the stud, the ring, the boot, the glove, every one dated, in a sister’s small hard pencil.
“You kept everything,” Mara said.
“Every button,” Nora said.
“Dated.”
“I told you I wanted an accounting.”
“You told me.” Nora’s voice held.
“Here it is. The whole of you, on paper, where the water can’t reach.”
Mara looked at the page a long time, and her hand lay on it flat, the way you cover the thing you have just been given back.
Then Nora took up her pencil and wrote, at the bottom of the last page, under all the entries, the one thing the book had never held in a hundred and six years of keeping.
Mara.
She said it aloud, once, the way you learn a name you mean to keep.
And the town said it after her—the women from the steps first, then the storekeeper, then the rest of them, the name passing down the strand the way a name passes when it comes home.
Half of them had never known it.
The other half had spent it.
Now it was theirs to keep, and keeping it cost nothing.
It was not an entry.
It was only a name, said where the water could hear it, and the water had no book left to put it in.
Nora took off her coat and put it on her sister’s shoulders.
Eli found the lantern in the mud at the foot of the flat rock, set back there by the going water, the glass whole.
He dried it on his sleeve, with the hand that had been dead, and worked the flint, and the flame caught and stood.
He set it on the flat rock.
Lit for nobody.
Priced at nothing.
Owed to no one.
He did not stay to tend it.
There was nothing left to tend it against.
Behind them the town was already going back to its counters and its doorsteps, and the sound of it was ordinary, shutters and a hammer somewhere, people who expected tomorrow.
The sun came up over an ordinary water.
On the strand, at the edge of the dry, stood the woman who had walked in so it would not follow him, and the man who had kept walking for three years.
The lamp burned on the rock behind them, and the lake lay quiet, holding nothing, and neither of them was going anywhere.