The Paperboy Who Cleared Her Walk

His name was Remy Thibodeau. I knew that from the little yellow card he pushed through the storm door the first week, with the name in pencil and the amount in dollars and cents: $4.25 a week, collected Fridays after school.

I saw him on the first Friday after Clement died. The house was full of covered dishes in Pyrex that did not belong to me, and I had not dressed properly since Tuesday, and there was a knock at the storm door at ten past four.

He was a thin boy with a cowlick and a canvas bag across his chest that hung to his knees. His coat was a man’s coat, cut down, with the cuffs turned back twice. He had the yellow card in one hand and a little pencil in the other.

I said, “Hello, Remy. Come in out of the wind.”

He did not come in. He stood on my porch with his mouth a little open, and nothing came out of it.

I have taught Sunday school for thirty years. I know the difference between a child who has forgotten what to say and a child who knows exactly what he wants to say and cannot get it out of his mouth. The first one looks up at the ceiling. The second one looks at your feet, and his jaw works, and the color rises up his neck, and he hates you a little for watching.

So I did not watch. I looked past him at the maple tree. I took my purse off the hall table and counted out the four dollars and a quarter slowly, coin by coin, and I let that long silence go by on my porch like a freight train that I had no business hurrying.

It went on a full minute. I counted it by the clock in the hall. I will tell you that was the longest minute I had spent in nine weeks that was not about grief, and I was grateful for it.

Then he said, in one terrible rush, as though he had lifted something over a fence, “I’m sorry about Mr. Tarbell.”

That was all. Five words. It had cost him everything he had.

“Thank you, Remy,” I said. “He would have liked you. He liked anybody who showed up on time.”

He wrote my name on the yellow card. He went down the steps two at a time, nearly skidded on the wet leaves, and was gone around the corner of the Dufresnes’ hedge with the canvas bag banging his legs.

I did not give it another thought, because I was a widow of four days with a house full of casseroles. When I stood at that kitchen window two months later, I did not put the two things together for almost a week.

The second snow came the following Tuesday, a wet six inches. I did not sleep. I had been waking at four most mornings since October, when the house was at its emptiest, so I got up and sat in the dark kitchen with my coffee and waited to see if it would happen again.

At five-oh-eight there was a light on the street. At five-eleven I saw the shape come up the walk with the shovel from the porch, which means that the first thing he did, every time, was reach behind the milk box and take it.