The Paperboy Who Cleared Her Walk

And he took his time. He said it all, every word of it, Fourteen Pleasant Street, a woman on the kitchen floor, she has a bad heart and a new knee, she is conscious and she is talking. He said it with the stutter in front of every word like a man carrying a plank through a crowd. It took the better part of two minutes. Carol Ann Beaudoin did not interrupt him once.

“That child,” she told me, “is the reason you are alive.”

Mr. Dufresne let them in with Clement’s tagged key. The ambulance crew came up my walk and my steps, and one of them said, “Somebody did a nice job on these steps.”

I was three days in the hospital in Littleton. Marian drove up in a state and said what I had known she would say, and I said what I had known I would say. “Not yet,” I told her, and she cried, and I let her.

“Mom, who found you?”

“A neighbor,” I said, which was true.

When Mr. Dufresne drove me home on Friday, it had snowed twice while I was away. The walk was bare. The steps were swept. And inside the storm door, standing on their ends in the dry, there were three Couriers, folded in thirds with the crosswords turned up, one for each morning I had been gone.

None of them had been touched. He had saved them.

That night I did all three crosswords at the kitchen table in Clement’s pen. I got two of them wrong, and I did not care.

The year he graduated, I went to his open house.

It was a Saturday in June, at a small gray house on Tannery Road with a folding table in the yard and a sheet cake from the Hannaford. I came with a card and a casserole, and I stood at the edge of the lawn in my good dress feeling like a thief.

His mother found me. Monique Thibodeau is a small, tired, quick-eyed woman who works nights as an aide at the county nursing home and sleeps from nine until two. She took both my hands.

“You’re the lady on Pleasant Street,” she said. “I know your storm door better than my own.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” I said, and she gave me a look that told me she knew exactly what I meant, and what I knew.

A woman in a lavender cardigan came over, with a paper plate of cake in each hand. She was introduced as Mrs. Daigle, who had been Remy’s speech teacher at the elementary school from the third grade on. She was retired now. She had come anyway.

“He didn’t speak in school for most of the third grade,” Mrs. Daigle said, low, so that only I could hear. “Not one word. A boy had mimicked him, in front of the class, and Remy shut like a door.”

“I didn’t know that,” I said, and the sentence came out smaller than I meant.

“I gave him a homework assignment. One sentence, out loud, ten times a morning. To anybody. To the dog, to a tree, to a door. Doors don’t finish your sentences for you, I told him.” She looked at me over the plate. “He chose a door. He wouldn’t tell me whose.”

I did not say anything.