The Paperboy Who Cleared Her Walk

“He said it would be a long way to the end of the sentence,” she said. “He said he would know he was ready when he could say it three times in a row on a bad morning with no stumble. He has never done it. Not once, in seven years.” She put a fork in my hand. “He is going to be so frightened that I told you any of this, Mrs. Tarbell. So I haven’t.”

“No,” I said. “You haven’t told me a thing.”

She nodded as if we had signed something. And across the lawn, in a borrowed white shirt that was too short in the wrists, Remy Thibodeau looked up from a plate of potato salad and saw me, and went the color of a boiled beet, and lifted one hand.

I lifted mine.

That was all. That was the whole conversation. But I drove home that afternoon with my heart doing nothing worse than aching, and I thought, he has seven years of practice. He is nearly there.

I could wait.

I waited three more winters.

In the eighth winter the Courier stopped delivering by hand. It went to the mail, and the paper that came to Haddon came a day late. Nine of us on Pleasant and Elm, all past seventy, did not own the kind of telephone that would let us read it any other way. Remy kept walking our papers on his own, at half past four, before his shift in the yard at Berube Lumber. Nobody asked him to. Nobody paid him.

In the tenth winter, in February, his mother stopped me after church.

“He got into the co-op,” Monique said. “The lineman apprenticeship, over in Lancaster. He starts the first week of April.”

“Clement climbed for the co-op,” I said. I could hardly get it out.

“I know. He told me. It’s why he applied.” She held on to my sleeve. “It’s four weeks of pole school and then he’s on call, nights and storms. He won’t have his mornings anymore, Mrs. Tarbell. Not for the route. Not for anything.”

So I knew which snow would be the last.

It came on the nineteenth of March, a wet seven inches, on a Wednesday. I did not sleep. At a quarter to five I put on Clement’s barn coat and wrapped a quilt around my knees and carried a kitchen chair out onto my own porch, in the dark, and I sat down with two cups of coffee on the rail and a Maxwell House can in my lap.

At nine minutes past five, a light came up Pleasant Street.

He was six feet tall by then, with Clement’s shoulders. He came through the gate with the shovel already in his hand, head down, and he had cleared the first step before he saw the chair.

He stopped with the blade in the air. The headlamp swung up and caught me full in the face.

“Good morning, Remy,” I said.

I will tell you what I saw. I saw a grown man go back to being eleven. His shoulders came up around his ears. His mouth opened, and nothing came out, and his jaw worked, and I looked past him at the maple tree and I did what I had done once before, ten years earlier, on that porch.

I waited.

I counted it by the clock on the church steeple across the roofs. It was a full minute. I have never waited so well.

Then he lowered the shovel. He closed his eyes. And in a voice that had gone down into the cellar of a man, he said:

“Good morning, Mrs. Tarbell.”

He said it again, whole. And a third time.