What the House Kept

Chapter Two — What He Waters

The first night in the house, I woke at 3 a.m. to the sound of running water and lay still, listening, doing the arithmetic of an old house settling against the arithmetic of a man who was supposed to have gone home.

There was no home to go to. I learned that later.

In the morning I found him in the side garden with a watering can, tipping it slow over a bed of something I didn't recognize. The bed was neat. It had been neat in a way that takes years, not weeks, the kind of neatness that means someone has been coming out here every day and deciding, each time, that this particular living thing was worth keeping alive.

"What are those," I asked.

"Heart's-ease." He didn't look up. "They come back ugly in the spring if you don't cut them. Most people don't bother."

"Most people don't live here."

"No." He straightened, the can empty, and looked at me for the first time that morning. "Most people don't."

I had a list of things to do. Find the deed. Call the realtor. Decide whether the roof was worth fixing or worth admitting. I do that, I make lists, it's how I keep a day from turning on me.

I did none of it that day.

Instead I walked the rooms with him while he did what he did, opened windows, checked a trap under the sink, ran the tap until the water came clear and brown and then clear again, and each thing he touched he touched like it belonged to a specific person, which it did, and that person was dead, and he went on touching it that way, and I couldn't decide whether that was loyalty or something worse.

At the end of the hall there was a door I remembered.

He walked past it without slowing.

"What's in there," I said.

"Your father's study." Flat. "I keep it aired."

"You keep it aired."

"Once a week. Windows open, dust off. It doesn't want to be a museum." He looked down the hall at the door like he could see through it. "I wouldn't go in today. Give it a few days. It'll tell you when."

"Things don't tell people things."

He smiled at that, a small one, the first of them, and it didn't reach whatever he keeps behind it. "You'll fit here better than you think," he said, and went to wash the can, and I stood in the hall alone with the door and the porch light burning behind me, and I did not open it.

I was afraid it would be neat.

*To be continued.*