I let her.
I let the silence sit until it was long enough to be a kindness. Long enough that she could feel that I had heard her, and that it was okay.
Then I said, “I will use the side stairs. I will not run the kitchen heater. I will replace the deadbolt if it breaks. I will pay for the propane I use. The rent goes to the diner on the first of every month, in cash, in an envelope. Is there anything else.”
“No.”
“Then I will move my things in. Thank you, Maple.”
She watched me walk back to the truck. I felt her watch me. I did not turn around. Turning around would have been acknowledgment. It would have been weakness.
She was still on the porch when I made the second trip. By the time I made the third — I had needed three after all, because the wooden box was heavier than I’d calculated — she was gone.
The apartment wassmall and clean and smelled like cedar.
I stood in the doorway for a long minute, holding the wooden box.
My grandmother’s voice — my mother’s mother, dead nine years now — said in my head:clean is a kind of love.That had been what she had said when she had come into the apartment in Saint Paul where I and Caleb had lived for the one year before Caleb died. She had walked through it once, taking in every detail. She had saidclean is a kind of love,and then she had hung her purse on the back of a chair and stayed three days. She had taught me to cook one thing in that time: a bread soup with tears in it. I had not made it since.
This apartment — Maple’s grandmother’s apartment, before it was Maple’s, before it was mine — had been kept clean by a woman who was no longer alive to keep it clean. I could feel that presence. The care. The intention.
I set the wooden box on the small kitchen table. It held Caleb’s things. The things from the box the priest at Saint Stanislaus had given me at the funeral. The things I could not throw away and could not look at.
I carried my bags into the bedroom one at a time. The bed was a full, not a queen — too short for me by six inches at the foot — and the blankets were folded military-square. Precise. Someone had cared about precision. The closet was empty. The dresser had old paper liners in the drawers, slightly yellowed but clean. I emptied my clothes into the dresser without unfolding them.
I set up the photo of my brother on the nightstand last.
Caleb at twenty-one, in his Boston University jersey, leaning against a goalpost. Smiling. Always smiling. I had never been a smiler. Caleb had been the one who smiled for both of us. Caleb had smiled at me from across a classroom when I felt like the only person in the world who could not figure out how to be alive. Caleb had smiled at me on the ice, ten years ago, when I had made my first save in the show.
I sat on the edge of the bed and looked at the photo for a long time.
Then I reached into the inside pocket of my coat and found the rosary.
It was a wooden one. Olive wood. Caleb’s. From the funeral mass at Saint Stanislaus in Saint Paul. The priest had pressed it into my hand at the door of the church and saiddon’t give this back, I have more,in the voice of a man who had given many of these away. The priest had understood that I was not goingto pray with it. That it was a talisman. A thing to hold when the hands needed to hold something.
I held the beads in my fist. I did not say a prayer. I had not said a prayer in thirteen years. I just held them until my hand was warm and the wood was warm and the apartment was warm around me.
I put the rosary in the drawer of the nightstand.
I put the wooden box on top of it. I closed the drawer carefully, the way you close something you’re not ready to look at again.
I went to make myself dinner with the food I had bought at the gas station two towns back.
I was eatingcanned soup at the kitchen table at six-fifteen when the small fist hit the apartment door.
I froze with the spoon halfway to my mouth.
The fist hit the door again. Lower this time. Like the puncher had decided the higher knock was not getting attention and tried again at chest level.
I set the spoon down carefully. I had learned to move carefully. It was a lesson my body had learned after Caleb’s death. Walked to the door. Opened it.
A child was on the landing.
Five, maybe six years old. Brown hair sticking straight up like he’d been electrocuted. Snowsuit zipped to the chin. Boots untied, the laces trailing in the snow. A hockey stick in one mittened hand that was substantially taller than he was. He was looking up at me with his head all the way back, which meant I was taller than I appeared.
“Hi,” the kid said.
I said, “Hi.”
