Chapter 7

Bo came to the house on a Thursday, in the agency truck, and parked in her lane like a man who had every right to.

He didn't come in. He stood on the porch with the checkbook in his hand and said he'd been thinking about her, and that Traywick Insurance wanted to do right by a woman who'd fed half this county out of a school kitchen.

"The carrier won't pay on the report," he said. "But the agency can. Full amount. I'll write it right here." He clicked the pen. "You sign the withdrawal, I write the check, and the bank stops calling."

Ruth Ann looked at the checkbook and then at the five acres her husband had cleared with a borrowed tractor, and she thought about how easy it would be.

"No," she said.

Bo put the pen away slowly. "The bank takes it in February," he said. "You know that."

"I know it."

He walked back to the truck and then turned around, like he'd remembered something small.

"Marlene's getting forgetful," he said. "I'm doing the typing myself from now on."

He drove off, and Ruth Ann stood on the porch a long time, because that was the first time he had ever said her name - Marlene's name - out loud to her.

Junior Purdy came at dark. She heard him on the steps and opened the door and he stood there in a jacket from the next county with his hands in his pockets, nineteen years old and hollow-eyed.

"I'm sorry, ma'am," he said.

"Junior."

"It wasn't your wiring," he said. "I just - I wanted you to know that."

"Then what was it?"

He shook his head and stepped back off the porch, and went down the lane on foot, past the hydrant, into the dark.

Ruth Ann sat at the table with the notebook and wrote: Not the wiring. He knows. She sat there until ten o'clock.

At 10:20 she heard a truck on the gravel and went to the window without turning on the light.

A county truck sat at the end of her lane with its parking lights on. A man in a county jacket was crouched at her hydrant with a wrench and a rag, and he worked there eleven minutes, and when he stood up, the brass cap on her hydrant was new - bright, unpainted, and turning free on threads that had been painted shut since before her husband bought the place.

She watched him drive away. She didn't go out. She was sixty-three and alone at the end of a county road, and she knew exactly what she had just seen.

She sat down and opened the notebook and wrote the date, the time, and the words: New cap.

Then she wrote, under it: It isn't the hydrant. It's the paper.