I read that card standing in my nightgown with my feet going numb on the cold boards. Then I laughed until I had to hold the door frame. It was the first time I had laughed since Clement, and I laughed so hard that I woke the cat.
I kept the card. I did not know yet that it would be the first of ten.
The next thing I tried was cookies, because I come from a long line of women who say what they cannot say with molasses. I baked two dozen on a Thursday night and set them on Clement’s good Blue Willow plate with wax paper over them and left them inside the storm door before bed.
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In the morning the plate was empty. Not a crumb on the wax paper. And by the time I got the paper in, the plate was back in the storm door, washed, with the wax paper folded in quarters on top of it.
So I understood the rules. He would take a cookie. He would not take money. He would take a plate of something warm, and wash the plate, and bring it back, and not be thanked for any of it. It was a fair set of rules, and I have lived by worse ones.
I baked on Thursdays after that, all ten winters, whenever the forecast said snow. Molasses, mostly. Then oatmeal with raisins, when I found out about his mother. Once a coffee cake, which came back with a hand-drawn thumbs-up in pencil tucked under the plate. I have kept that too.
In ten winters, I never once had a real conversation with that boy in the light of day.
On Fridays he came for the money. He held out the yellow card. I counted out the four dollars and a quarter and set it in his palm, and said, “Thank you, Remy,” and he nodded, and sometimes if the word was an easy one he said, “Welcome.” That was a good week, a week with a word in it.
I did not ask him anything. I did not say, “Was that you in my walk?” I did not say, “Do you want to come in for a cocoa?” I knew what it cost him to stand on my porch. I would not take one more minute of it than he had decided to give.
But I want to tell you about the thing I heard, because that is the part I have never told anybody until now, and it is the reason I am writing this down.
It was the second winter. A hard January, with eleven storms in six weeks, and the cold the kind that makes the nails in a house pop at night like gunshot. I woke at four, as I always did, and I sat in the dark kitchen with my coffee, and at five-oh-nine I heard the scrape of Clement’s shovel on the top step.
I had learned the sound the way you learn a heartbeat. The scrape, the sweep, the scrape. And under it, so low that at first I thought it was the furnace, there was another sound.
A voice.
It was a boy’s voice, low and unsteady, and it was saying something to my front door.
I got up very slowly and stood by the window with my hand flat on the cold glass, and I listened. I could not make out the words. The wind took them. But I could hear the shape of them. It was the same few words, over and over, in the same order. He would start them, and stumble, and stop, and start again from the top. Over and over, the way you say the Pledge of Allegiance to yourself when you are small and learning it by heart.