Shutters

The old rail on her stairs was a length of galvanized pipe that someone had bolted to the stringers in another century, and it moved when you touched it, and June had learned in three weeks to go up and down without touching it.

At eight on Saturday morning Gray Donnelly took it off with a pipe wrench in about four minutes and carried it across the gravel and laid it in the bed of his truck like something he’d shot.

She watched from the landing with the white mug in her hand. She hadn’t taken it to the sawhorse. He was on her stairs, and the sawhorse rule had never accounted for that, and she’d stood in her kitchen at 6:04 with the coffee poured and thought about it for a full minute before she opened the door and carried it down to the third step and held it out to him where he knelt.

He’d looked at the mug. He’d looked at her. He’d taken it.

“Rail’s going to be cedar,” he said, coming back across the gravel with a long clean plank on his shoulder. It was the first thing he’d said all morning that wasn’t about the coffee, which he hadn’t said anything about either. “Thirty-four inches. That’s code.”

“I trust you on code.”

“You should.” He set the plank on the treads and squared it with his eye. “Third one’s coming out too. I’ve got a new tread cut.”

“Leave the third one.”

He looked up.

“I like it,” she said. “I told you. I know where I am.”

He didn’t argue. He didn’t say anything. He got down on one knee on the fourth step with a drill and a coffee can of brackets and started marking the stringers, and June leaned on the landing post — the new one, he’d set it Thursday night after story hour, she’d come home and there it had been — and drank her own coffee and watched the harbor turn from gray to a lighter gray.

Thursday had happened. She had a number for it: forty-four, with the kindergarten. He’d come at ten to nine in the gear and stood at the edge of the rug and let twenty-two children try the helmet, and he’d said once and fifty pounds and firefighter, and when the hour was over he’d said “Callahan” at the door and gone. The blue chair had been back at the little table where she’d put it. Neither of them had looked at it.

That was how it was. She’d decided that was fine. She’d read him two paragraphs about a boat and his hands had gone still and then he’d stood up so fast he’d knocked over a chair, and he’d said Thursday, and then Thursday had come and he’d stood at the edge of the rug like a man on a pier. She knew what a door looked like from the hallway side. She was not going to knock twice.

Her phone rang.

She looked at the screen and something in her chest folded up neat and small, the way it always did, and she answered before it could finish folding.

“Hi, Mom.”

“Junie. Hi, baby. Is this a bad time?”

“No. No, I’m just — I’m home. Saturday. Are you okay?”

“I’m good. I’m good, honey.” Her mother’s voice had the upswing in it, the brightness. It was the between voice, the one June had learned to hear the edges of by the time she was ten, because the between voice meant a good stretch and a good stretch meant you had a little time before the next thing. “The light’s really nice here right now. Did I tell you I moved the chair? I moved the blue chair over by the window and I sit there in the mornings and it’s — you’d like it. You’d really like it.”

“That sounds nice.”

“It is nice.” A pause. June could hear a television somewhere behind her, low. “Anyway. I hate to do this. I really hate to, honey, you know I do.”

“What’s going on.”

“It’s Ray. It’s the rent. I was a little short this month because the pharmacy changed the — they changed my copay and nobody told me, and I had to — anyway, I was short, and Ray’s being — you know how he is. He says if it’s not there by Monday he’s going to have to —”

“How much.”

“It’s six-forty, but honey, I only need —”

“I’ll send it.”

“— maybe half, I could probably —”

“I’ll send it today. Now. It’ll be there by Monday.”

Her mother stopped. The television murmured. June stood on the landing with the white mug in one hand and the phone in the other and looked at the harbor, and she could hear her mother breathe in the way she did when she was about to cry and was going to be brave about it instead.

“You’re my good girl,” her mother said.

“I know.”

“You’ve always been my good girl.”

“I know, Mom. I’ve got to go. I’ll text you when it goes through.”

“Okay. Okay, baby. Love you.”

“Love you.”

She hung up.

She opened the banking app. She did it standing there, with her thumb, the way you’d do anything you’d done enough times that your hand knew it. Six hundred forty. Her mother’s account. The little wheel spun. The check mark came.

Two thousand one hundred and forty. That was the number since January, not counting Christmas. She knew it the way she knew Ferdinand had eleven runners going and forty yogurt cups had gone into thirty-nine kitchen windows. She hadn’t written it down anywhere. She didn’t need to. It was in her the way all the numbers were, and she didn’t look at it, and she put the phone in her cardigan pocket and picked the mug back up.

Below her, the drill had stopped.

She looked down. He was on the fourth step on one knee with the drill in his hand, and he wasn’t drilling. He was looking up at her. He’d been six feet away with the door open and a woman’s voice coming out of a phone, and he was not a man who missed things, and his face wasn’t doing anything, and she knew he’d heard every word.

“Sorry,” she said. “That was — I should’ve gone inside.”

He set the drill down on the tread.

“What do you need,” he said.

She didn’t understand. “For the rail?”

“No.”

“Thirty-four’s fine. Whatever’s code.”

“Not the rail.” He didn’t move off his knee. He said it the way he’d said doors and once and fifty pounds, flat, with nothing behind it and nothing in front of it. “You. What do you need.”

June opened her mouth.

Nothing came.

She stood on the landing with the mug in her hand and the harbor behind her and her mouth open, and she reached for it — the answer, the thing you said when someone asked that — and there was nothing on the shelf. There wasn’t a shelf. She’d spent thirty-one years being the one who asked the question, and she knew every shape the answer could take, she’d heard them all, a ride, a casserole, a card, five dollars toward a book you kept for three years, and she had never once in her life been on this side of it, and it turned out she didn’t have the words for it. Not the answer. The words.

She counted. She couldn’t help it. Four. Five. Six.

He waited. He didn’t fill it. He knelt on her stairs with his hands on his thigh and let it sit there between them, the silence, and it got bigger, and it had a shape, and she could feel the shape of it. It was the exact size of the hole where an answer should have been.

Eleven. Twelve.

Her stomach made the noise. She hadn’t eaten. She had a granola bar in the kitchen. She pressed her free hand flat against it.

“I —” she said.

Sixteen.

“People don’t ask me that.”

“I’m asking.”

Twenty.

She looked at the harbor because she couldn’t look at him. She thought: nothing. She could say nothing. It was the word that fit the hole. She’d said it a thousand times. I’m fine, I don’t need anything, don’t worry about me. It was right there and it was a lie and she stood on the landing and found she couldn’t say the lie either, not to him, not with his hands on his knee and his face like that, and so she stood there and said nothing at all, and the nothing was worse than the word would have been, and it went on.

Both phones went off at once.

It was the sound — the shriek, the two-tone emergency alert that every phone in the county made together, and it came out of her cardigan pocket and out of his back pocket at the same instant and bounced off the garage, and she jumped and the coffee went over her wrist.

He had his out first. He read it. She got hers out and read it with the coffee running down into her sleeve.

NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE PORTLAND. HIGH WIND WARNING. A STRONG PACIFIC STORM WILL MAKE LANDFALL ALONG THE NORTHERN OREGON COAST SUNDAY EVENING. SOUTH WINDS 50 TO 65 MPH WITH GUSTS TO 90 MPH. DAMAGING WINDS WILL BLOW DOWN TREES AND POWER LINES. WIDESPREAD POWER OUTAGES EXPECTED. TRAVEL WILL BE DIFFICULT, ESPECIALLY FOR HIGH-PROFILE VEHICLES.

“Ninety,” she said.

“Gusts.” He put the phone away. He looked at the sky, which was flat and pale and gave nothing away, and then at the harbor, and then at the big window at the end of the garage, the one the seat was under. “That faces southwest.”

“I know which way it faces.”

“Wind’s going to come straight up the harbor and hit it.”

“It’s held before.”

“Not ninety.” He picked the drill back up. He looked at the stringer he’d marked and drove the first bracket screw, and the sound went off the garage and came back, and he said the next thing to the wood. “I’m on at seven tomorrow. Forty-eight.”

“I know.”

“That’s today, then.”

“Today what?”

“Shutters.”

She stood on the landing with her wrist wet and her question unanswered and looked down at the back of his head.

“Gray. You’ve got one day off.”

“I’ve got today.” He set the second screw. “Drink your coffee. Get out of the doorway. I’ve got to hang this.”

---

She went to town at eleven because there were picture books on the bottom shelf of the children’s room and the children’s room had flooded in 2007, Nell said, ankle-deep, and June had a whole quarter of circulation numbers sitting nine inches off the floor.

Front Street was different. She felt it before she could name it. The bakery had its door open and Marguerite was on a stepladder screwing a sheet of plywood over the front window with a drill in one hand and a scone in her mouth. The hardware store had a line out the door and a hand-lettered sign taped to the glass that said NO GENERATORS NO PLYWOOD NO D BATTERIES SORRY. Two men June didn’t know were dragging a skiff up the boat ramp on a trailer with a truck that didn’t have the power for it and yelling at each other about it. Somebody had already sandbagged the door of the post office, and the sandbags were leaking.

The station’s bay doors were open. Both of them.

She slowed. She hadn’t meant to. The engine was out on the apron with every compartment door open, and the medic was behind it, and there were people moving in and out of the bay in a way she’d never seen — not fast, exactly, but constant, like a tide that had decided to come in all at once. Rosie was on the tailboard passing sandbags down to a kid in a volunteer’s jacket. Sheehan was underneath the engine again. Fitz was sitting on an overturned bucket in the bay door with a chainsaw across his knees and a file in his bandaged hand, sharpening the chain tooth by tooth with the face of a man saying a rosary, and Captain Brannigan was inside at the steel table with a map spread out and his glasses on his forehead and three people June didn’t recognize standing around him.

Fitz looked up. He saw her car. He lifted the file.

She pulled in.

“Library,” he said, when she got out. He didn’t stop sharpening. “You got water?”

“I’ve got — some.”

“Get more. You got candles.”

“I’ve got a flashlight.”

“Get candles. Flashlight’s for finding the candles.” He turned the chain a tooth. “Batteries?”

“The hardware store’s out.”

“Marguerite’s got a box under the counter. Tell her I sent you. She’ll charge you double and give you a scone.” Another tooth. “Where’s the lieutenant.”

“Cutting plywood.”

Fitz’s file stopped.

Rosie, on the tailboard, had heard. She set a sandbag down on the kid’s outstretched arms without looking at him and turned around.

“Plywood,” Fitz said.

“For the windows. The big one. He says it faces southwest.”

“It does face southwest.” Fitz looked at Rosie. Rosie looked at Fitz. Something went across the apron between them that June was not in on, and she stood there in her cardigan with her keys in her hand and waited to be let in on it.

“He didn’t board the house,” Rosie said.

“No.”

“Two years. Three storms. He’s never put a board on that house. He put a new roof on it and let the windows take it.”

“I know what he did, Keough.”

“He’s boarding hers.”

“I heard her.”

Rosie looked at June for a long second, and her face did the thing it had done on the stairs with the horse book — not quite a smile, something more careful than that.

“Okay,” she said. “Okay. Go get your candles.”

“Rosie —”

“Don’t be at the library tomorrow night.” Rosie picked up the next sandbag. “I mean it. Don’t be anywhere. Be home. Be up that hill with your door shut and your phone charged and don’t come down it for anything, because we’re not going to be able to get to you if you do. Understand?”

“I’ll be home.”

“Good.” She passed the bag down. “And June.”

June stopped.

“Bring the plants in from the window.”

---

He’d cut the panels by the time she got back at two.

They were leaning against the garage in a row, seven of them, half-inch plywood cut to size with the edges sanded so they wouldn’t splinter, and each one had a number on it in pencil in the corner, and she stood in the turnaround with a bag of candles and a box of batteries and a scone she hadn’t asked for and counted them. Seven. One for the kitchen window. One for the bathroom. One for each of the two small windows on the stair side. Three for the big one — it was too wide for one sheet, so he’d cut it in three and she could see where he’d laid them out on the gravel to check the seams.

He was at the sawhorses with a drill and a box of something.

“What are those,” she said.

“Hanger bolts.” He held one up. It was a bolt with wood threads on one end and machine threads on the other, and a wing nut. “I set these in the frame. Panel goes on, wing nut goes on. Comes off in two minutes after. Goes back on next time without the drill.”

“Next time.”

“There’s always a next time.” He set the bolt down. “You get candles?”

“And batteries. And a scone. Marguerite charged me double.”

“That’s fair.” He looked at the bag. “You eat?”

“I’ll eat later.”

He didn’t say anything. He picked up the drill and went to the ladder.

She went inside and did what Rosie said. She took the four pots off the sill one at a time — Ferdinand first, because he was the biggest and would have argued, then Beatrice, then Hyacinth, then Nell — and carried them across the room and set them in a row on the square table by the kitchen wall where the wind couldn’t get them, and Ferdinand’s leaves fell over the edge of the table and nearly touched the floor and she turned him to face the window anyway, out of habit, even though the window was about to stop being a window.

The ladder went up outside the glass.

She heard it before she saw it — the aluminum feet finding the gravel, the shift as he tested it — and then his boots on the rungs, and then there he was, filling the lower right corner of the big window, eighteen inches from the glass, with the drill in one hand and a pencil behind his ear and the sleeves of the gray thermal pushed up.

June sat down on the window seat. She picked up the first book in the first cubby, which was the knots book, and opened it in her lap. She did not read it.

He was marking the frame. He held the pencil in his right hand and his left was flat against the cedar trim he’d put up himself, three weeks ago, and he ran the pencil along a line she couldn’t see and his forearm moved with it. The burn caught the light. It went from the wrist up under the sleeve, shiny and pale, and when he turned his hand the tendons stood up under it like cords under a sheet, and she looked at the knots book. There was a diagram of a bowline. She’d never tied a bowline. She looked at it very hard.

The drill went. He was setting the first bolt. He’d put a pilot hole in with the bit and now he had the bolt in the chuck backward, driving the wood threads in, and it took muscle, she could see it take muscle — his shoulder set, his jaw set, the forearm going hard and flat from the elbow down and the tendon at the wrist jumping — and then it was in and he let off and shook his hand out once, quick, like a man flicking water.

He looked up.

She was looking at the bowline. She had been looking at the bowline the entire time. She turned a page.

He set the second bolt. The third. He moved the ladder and came back and set the fourth, and she watched all of them — the pilot bit, the switch, the drive, the shake — and she told herself she was learning something about hanger bolts and she was not. She was watching a man’s forearms through a window and she knew it and she kept doing it, because he was eighteen inches away with glass between them and he couldn’t hear her breathe, and it was the safest she’d ever felt looking at anything.

Then he came down the ladder and picked up the first panel.

It went up. She saw his hands on the edge of it, and then his face over the top of it for a second, and then the plywood came against the glass with a soft flat sound and the right third of the harbor went dark.

She sat there in the two-thirds light.

The wing nuts went on. She could hear them, four of them, the threads catching and the last quarter turn by hand. Then the ladder moved. The second panel came. The middle of the harbor went. It was strange, watching it go — the water and the far shore and the jetty and the gray sky, cut off in a straight line a third at a time, like somebody was shelving it. The room got dimmer. The books in the cubbies lost their color.

The third panel. His hands on the edge. His face for one second over the top of it, and this time he looked straight through the glass at her sitting on the seat he’d built with a book in her lap she wasn’t reading, and she didn’t have time to look away, and she didn’t.

The plywood came down. The window was gone.

She sat in the dark with the book open on her knees and listened to the wing nuts go on. Four. Then the ladder feet on the gravel, moving toward the kitchen side.

She got up and turned on the lamp.

He did the small windows next, the two on the stair side, and she heard him on the landing and on the steps and heard the panels go up and the room got darker still, and then he did the bathroom, and then there was only the little window over the sink with NOT PAST HERE on its frame, and it was the only light left in the apartment that wasn’t a bulb.

She stood at the counter. She had the white mug in her hand. She’d washed it. She was drying it with a towel, and it was dry, and she kept drying it.

He was on the ladder outside the sink window. This one was low — the sill was at her chest — so he was closer to her level than he’d been at the big one, and closer, too, because the kitchen wall was the near wall and the ladder was practically against it. She could see his hands and the drill and the bottom half of his face. She could see the silver in his beard. She could see, when he leaned in to set the pilot hole, a drop of sweat run from his temple into it, and she looked at the mug.

The drill went. His forearm did the thing. She dried the mug.

He set four bolts around the frame of the little window, and on the fourth one the bit slipped and skated across the cedar and he said something she couldn’t hear through the glass that was probably damn, and he put his left palm flat on the sill to steady himself and set the bit again. His hand was right there. On the other side of the glass. She could have put hers on the window and matched it, palm to palm, and there’d have been a quarter inch of glass and a pencil line that said WET.

She put the mug down.

He drove the bolt. He shook out his hand. He looked up, and she was standing at the counter with an empty mug and a towel and nothing to do with either of them, and he looked at her through the little window for exactly as long as it took her to feel it, and then he reached down out of sight and came back up with the last panel.

He held it against the frame with one hand and looked at her over the top of it.

“Lamp’s on?” he said. She heard it through the glass, barely.

“Yes.”

“Okay.”

The plywood came down and the kitchen went dark except for the lamp.

She stood there. She listened to the wing nuts. Four. She listened to the ladder come down and get carried across the gravel and set against the garage. She listened to his boots on her stairs — the first, the second, the third that creaked — and then he was on the landing, and he knocked twice on the door, which he had never once done.

She opened it.

He was standing there with sawdust in his beard and the drill hanging from his hand and the sky behind him going the color of a bruise. Not from the storm. It was just evening. The storm was still out there somewhere, a day off, gathering itself.

“Baseboards are electric,” he said. “Power goes, heat goes. You’ve got the quilt.”

“I’ve got the quilt.”

“Candles in the drawer by the stove. Not on the seat.”

“Not on the seat.”

“Fill the tub tonight. Water’s on a pump. Pump’s electric.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Now you do.” He shifted the drill. He looked past her into the apartment, at the row of plants on the table and the lamp and the black rectangle where the harbor had been. “Don’t go down the hill.”

“Rosie said.”

“I’m saying.” He looked at her. “That’s the rule. Tomorrow. Don’t go down the hill for anything.”

“You’ve got two rules now.”

“It’s the same one.”

She stood in her doorway and looked at him, and he stood on her landing and looked at her, and the question was still there between them from the morning, unanswered, sitting on the third step where he’d asked it. She could feel it. She was fairly sure he could too. Neither of them picked it up.

“Thank you,” she said. “For the — all of it.”

“It’s plywood.”

“I know what it is.”

He went down the stairs. He didn’t say anything else. She stood in the door and watched him cross the gravel with the drill and go up his own steps and into his kitchen, and the light came on in there, and she shut her door and stood in an apartment with no windows and looked at the lamp.

She filled the tub. She put the candles in the drawer by the stove. She ate the scone standing at the counter and then, because he’d asked, she ate the granola bar too. She sat on the window seat with the knots book and read about the bowline for real this time and learned that it wouldn’t slip under load and would come undone with one hand afterward, which was the whole point of it.

She turned the plants a quarter turn on the table. Toward a wall.

“It’s temporary,” she told them.

---

The wind woke her at six-thirty Sunday.

Not much of it. The first of it. A long push against the plywood over the big window that made the whole panel hum on its bolts, and then quiet, and then another. She lay under the quilt in the dark — real dark, the shuttered kind, no gray at the edges — and listened to it find the garage and go around.

His truck started at six-forty.

She heard it turn over across the gravel and idle, and she got up and went to the door in her socks and opened it six inches, and the air came in wet and moving and smelled like the sea in a way it hadn’t before, like the whole ocean had come closer overnight. His headlights swung across the sawhorses. She saw the shape of him behind the wheel for one second, and then the truck was going down Cedar Hill with its taillights red in the wet, and then it was gone.

She looked down.

There was a coat on the newel post.

It hadn’t been there when she went to bed. She’d have seen it. It was hanging on the new cedar post at the top of her stairs, by the collar, the way you’d hang a thing you meant someone to find — a canvas work coat, brown gone gray at the elbows, with STATION 9 stenciled on the breast in letters half worn off and a tear at the hem somebody had closed with black thread in stitches that were straight and even and not at all like the ones on the back of his hand. His old one. The one he wore to cut lumber. He must have come up the stairs in the dark at six-thirty while she lay listening to the wind, and hung it there, and gone back down without making the third tread creak, which she hadn’t known was possible.

She took it off the post.

It was heavy. It was lined with something that had been flannel once. She put it on over her flannel pants and the sweatshirt and it came down past her knees and the sleeves went past her hands and she stood on the landing in it with the wind starting to come up the harbor for real now, in gusts that pushed the coat against her legs.

It smelled like cedar and smoke and coffee. Her coffee. She was almost sure.

She still didn’t have an answer to his question. She’d lain awake half the night with it, turning it, and there was still no shelf, and she was beginning to think there might never be, that a person could go thirty-one years without a thing and lose the place where it went.

But she was wearing his coat. He’d asked her what she needed and she’d said nothing and he’d built a box around her against the wind and left his coat on the post, and she stood inside all of it on the landing at a quarter to seven and pulled the collar up, and the storm came in off the ocean toward Harbor Point, and she went back inside to fill the kettle before the power went.

---