The Paperboy Who Cleared Her Walk

Three in a row. On a bad morning. No stumble.

He opened his eyes, and they were wet, and he said the rest, the part he had spent ten winters building.

“Thank you for waiting for me.”

All that time I had thought I was the one being looked after. I had been the one door in Haddon that waited.

I put down the can and stood up, and my knee, the titanium one, held.

“I heard you,” I told him. “Every winter since the second one. I stood at that window every time.”

“You were awake?”

“Since the first snow. I couldn’t have told you why. I think I was waiting for you, same as you were waiting for me.”

He sat down on my bottom step with the shovel across his knees and put his face in his mittens, and I let him, and I sat down beside him, and I am seventy-six, and I do not sit on porch steps. We stayed there till the sky went gray.

When he was ready, I gave him the can.

I had written his name on the lid in marker. Inside were ten cards, every one still sealed, every one with his pencil on the front. No thank you Mrs. Tarbell. R.T. Ten Decembers, a fifty in each, five hundred dollars he had never touched. On top of the cards lay a pair of lineman’s pliers with a worn leather grip and two letters scratched in the steel: C.T.

“That is not pay,” I said. “I will say that to you before you say it to me. It is for boots. A pole man needs good boots, and Clement would never let you climb in anything else.”

He picked up the pliers and turned them over, and his thumb found the initials.

“No thank you, Mrs. T-Tarbell,” he said, and he laughed, a wet, astonished laugh, and so did I.

He took them. Of course he did. He is Clement’s kind of man, and he knows when to let an old woman win.

He finished the pole school in May. In July I sat in the front row of a folding-chair ceremony at the co-op hall in Lancaster, in my good dress, and watched a young man in a hard hat the color of butter have a pair of hooks and a leather belt put into his hands. When they read the names, his was fourth. When he turned around and found me in the row, he did not look at his mother first.

Marian asked me again this fall about the room in Nashua. I said I was sure, and for the first time she did not argue.

The first snow of this year came last week, two inches, a Thursday night. I was up at four, out of habit. I put two cups on the porch rail.

At ten past five a pickup stopped on Pleasant Street, and a light came up the walk, and I opened the door before he reached the steps.

“Good morning, Mrs. Tarbell,” Remy said, in one piece, and I heard the one small hitch on the g that will never entirely leave him. I have come to love it the way I love the dent in Clement’s shovel.

“Good morning, Remy,” I said. “Your coffee’s getting cold.”

Both cups had somebody now.

This story is a dramatization. Names, characters, and details are invented, and any resemblance to real people or events is coincidental.