My grandson Leo is seven, fast, and entirely unaware of Arthur Pendelton. Arthur lives next door in a gray ranch house with immaculate hedges. He is eighty, walks with a heavy oak cane, and has a voice like grinding stones. If a baseball rolls onto his grass, Arthur keeps it. If a child rides a bike too close to his driveway, Arthur stands on his porch and glares until they leave.
I’ve warned Leo a dozen times to stay in our yard.
But Tuesday afternoon, the sky turned a bruised purple. The wind picked up, violently stripping leaves from the maples, and the tornado sirens began their low, terrifying wail. I ran into the backyard to grab Leo, but the yard was empty. His red plastic fire truck lay abandoned by the fence.
I called his name, my voice swallowed by the thunder. I searched the garage, the street, the neighbor’s side yard, rain soaking through my blouse. Panic closed my throat.
Then I saw Arthur.
He was limping up the street through the downpour, his cane abandoned somewhere behind him. He wasn’t wearing a coat. In his arms, wrapped tightly in Arthur’s own faded yellow cardigan, was Leo.
I ran to them, crying, reaching for my grandson. Arthur didn’t hand him over immediately. He stood there, soaked and shivering, looking down at Leo with an expression I had never seen on his weathered face.
“I told you I’d keep them away from the road,” Arthur whispered, though he wasn’t looking at me.
He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small, mud-stained silver locket.
Not Me. Him.
He didn’t give it to me. He held it out toward Leo, who was still bundled in that cardigan like a loaf of bread, and Leo shook his head.
“You keep it,” Leo said. “It’s yours. That’s the whole point.”
Arthur closed his hand around it. Then he finally let me take my grandson.
Leo weighed more wet. That’s a stupid thing to notice but it’s what I noticed. Fifty-one pounds at his last checkup and he felt like a sack of feed, and he was shaking, and his sneakers were packed with mud up past the laces.
The siren started its second cycle. I could hear the Hendersons’ dog losing its mind three houses down.
“Basement,” I said to Arthur. “Mine. Now.”
“I’ve got my own.”
“You don’t have your cane. You’re not walking back across two lawns in this. Come on.”
He looked at his house like it might argue for him. It didn’t. He followed me.
My basement is half finished. Carpet on one side, concrete on the other, and the concrete side is all Christmas boxes and my late husband Dale’s workbench, which I’ve never cleaned off because I can’t decide what’s junk. I got Leo onto the old plaid couch and stripped him down to his underwear and wrapped him in two beach towels. Arthur stood at the bottom of the stairs dripping onto the carpet. His white undershirt had gone see-through. You could see every rib.
I threw him a towel. He caught it against his chest without lifting his hands much.
The power went out at 4:12. I know because the clock on the dryer died with those numbers on it, and they stayed on my brain for days afterward.
I found the flashlight in Dale’s top drawer. When I clicked it on, Arthur was sitting on the bottom step with the locket open in his palm, just looking.
“May I?” I said.
He didn’t answer. He didn’t close his hand, either. I took that as a yes.
It was an old oval locket, the kind with a hinge that’s gone a little loose. Mud in the seam. On the left side was a photograph of a little girl, maybe six, with homemade bangs cut too short and a gap where her front teeth should be. She was grinning so hard her eyes were nearly shut. On the right side was a woman with dark hair pinned up, not smiling, but almost.
Engraved on the back, worn soft at the edges:
P.A.P. 1966 – 1973
I did the math the way I do all math, out of habit, counting on the side of my thumb with my fingertip. Thirty-one years as a teller at First Federal does that to you.
Seven.
She’d been seven.
The Gap in the Hedge
“Leo,” I said. “Where were you?”
He pulled the towel up over his nose. That’s what he does when he knows he’s in trouble, as if I’ll forget he’s there if I can only see his eyes.
“Leo.”
“The drain,” he said, muffled. “By the big road.”
The big road is Kessler. Four lanes. People take it at fifty to get to the interstate. Our street, Larch, dead-ends into it at the bottom of the hill, and there’s a concrete drainage ditch right at the corner with a grate where the storm water goes down to Mill Creek. I have told Leo about Kessler Road more times than I’ve told him to brush his teeth.
Something hot came up into my face. I wasn’t proud of what I wanted to do just then, which was grab his arm hard.
“You went to Kessler? In a tornado?”
“It wasn’t a tornado yet.”
“Leo Michael.”
“Mr. Arthur dropped it,” he said, and the towel came down, and he was crying now. “He dropped it in the leaves last Thursday when he was raking the ditch out and he couldn’t find it, and he said if it rained hard it’d go down the grate and then into the creek and then it’d be gone forever. He said forever, Grandma. And then it started raining hard.”
I looked at Arthur. Arthur was looking at the furnace.
“How do you know what Mr. Arthur said last Thursday?”
The towel went back up.
It took twenty minutes and most of a sleeve of saltines to get the whole thing. There’s a gap in the hedge at the back corner of Arthur’s yard, down low, where one of the boxwoods died two winters ago and he never replaced it. Leo had been crawling through it since the middle of June. Every afternoon I thought he was playing in the fort behind our shed.
He’d been sitting on an overturned bucket in Arthur’s garage.
“He has all the baseballs,” Leo said. “Like, all of them. Hundreds.”
“Sixty-three,” Arthur said. First thing he’d said in a while.
“He lets me pick one and throw it at the garage door. But only in the garage. Not the yard. The yard goes downhill.”
“It slopes,” Arthur said. “Toward Kessler.”
I thought about all those afternoons. The old man on his porch, glaring. Every kid on Larch Street saying he was a witch, or a murderer, or that he had a dead wife in the freezer. (That last one was the Doyle boy. He’s eleven and he says it about everyone.)
“You could’ve told me,” I said to Leo.
“He said you’d say no.”
I opened my mouth. Shut it. I would have said no.
Fifty-One Years on Larch Street
The siren cut off around 4:40. We didn’t move. The rain was still coming sideways against the little basement windows, and the wind made a sound in the dryer vent like someone blowing across a bottle.
Leo fell asleep. Kids can do that. One minute they’re sobbing about forever and the next minute they’re drooling on your couch cushion.
Arthur still had the locket open. I sat down on the step above him, because there wasn’t anywhere else to sit that didn’t mean turning my back on him.
“Her name was Patricia,” he said. “Patty. Patricia Ann.”
I didn’t say anything. I’d learned that at the bank, too. People will tell you their whole lives if you just keep counting their money and don’t look up.
“We bought this house in ’68. Yours, I mean. No, mine. Mine.” He rubbed his face with the towel. “Your place was empty lot then. Just field. She used to go out there and pull up Queen Anne’s lace and bring it to her mother in fists. Dirt still on the roots.”
“September of ’73. She had a red rubber ball. One of those, the playground kind, that sting your legs. I was at the plant. Marjorie was in the back hanging sheets.” He stopped. “It rolled. That’s all. Our driveway goes down and the yard goes down and Larch goes down, and it all goes to Kessler. It’s a hill. You don’t notice it till something’s rolling.”
“It was a pickup,” he said. “The man stopped. I’ll say that for him. He stopped and he stayed. He came to the funeral, even, stood in the back. Marjorie couldn’t look at him.”
His hands were shaking. Not from cold anymore, I didn’t think. He couldn’t get the locket to close, and it kept popping open on that loose hinge, and he kept trying.
“Kessler was two lanes back then,” he said. “Two lanes. I don’t know why that matters.”
I took the locket from him. Closed it with my thumb. Gave it back.
“The baseballs,” I said.
“Anything that comes onto my grass is going down that hill. Kids chase what’s theirs. That’s just. Kids chase.” He turned the locket over. “I don’t hate kids, Mrs. Fischer. I don’t know what people say. Probably that I hate kids.”
“They say you’ve got your wife in a freezer.”
He made a noise I’d never heard from him. It took me a second to understand it was a laugh.
“The Doyle boy,” he said.
“The Doyle boy.”
Behind the Woman
The power came back at 5:51. The dryer clock started blinking 12:00 and the furnace kicked on and the whole basement smelled like burnt dust for a minute, the way it does the first cold day of the year.
I made coffee. I brought him a mug and one of Dale’s flannel shirts from the box I’ve been meaning to drop at Goodwill for three years. He put it on over the wet undershirt. It was too big in the shoulders. Dale was a big man.
“That’s your husband’s,” he said.
“He’d want it worn.”
That was a lie. Dale didn’t care about shirts. But it was the kind of lie that doesn’t hurt anybody.
Arthur set the mug down on the step and opened the locket again. This time he worked a fingernail along the edge of the right-hand photograph, the woman. His fingers were too thick for it. Arthritis, or the cold, or eighty years. He tried three times.
“Can you,” he said.
Teller hands. I have opened ten thousand rolls of quarters with these fingernails. I got under the edge of the photograph and it lifted out like a little lid, and behind it was a square of paper folded so many times it was the size of a stamp.
“I didn’t know if the water got in,” he said. “That’s why. That’s why I needed it back. I don’t care about the silver.”
I unfolded it the way you’d unfold a dollar bill somebody’s had in their sock. Slow, with the pad of my finger flattening each crease against my knee.
It was the back of a pharmacy receipt. Kroger, I could see half the logo. The ink had run at one corner but the rest was fine. Pencil, mostly, then pen, like whoever wrote it had to switch partway through.
I read it out loud because he asked me to. He said his eyes weren’t good enough under the flashlight, and maybe that was true.
Artie. Listen to me. You keep them away from that road. All of them. Not just ours. Every one that comes up this street. I couldn’t do it and you weren’t here to do it but you’re here now. Don’t you dare go sit in that house and die on me. You keep them away from the road. Promise. M.
And then underneath, in different ink, smaller, shaky:
I mean it Artie.
“She wrote that at Mercy,” he said. “Hospice wing. 2011, March. She’d been pretty out of it, and then one morning she wasn’t, and she asked the nurse for a pen. The nurse only had a pencil. Then the pencil broke.” He was looking at the floor. “She died that Sunday.”
“Thirteen years,” I said. Counting again. I couldn’t stop myself.
“I’m not any good at it. I don’t know how you’re supposed to do it. I stand on the porch. I take the balls. I yell at the Sloan girl on her bicycle and her mother calls me a son of a bitch over the fence.” He shrugged inside Dale’s shirt. “I guess I thought if they were scared enough of me, they’d stay away from the bottom of the hill.”
“And then Leo crawled through your hedge.”
“And then your boy crawled through my hedge,” he said. “Sat down on a paint bucket. Asked me if I had any snacks. I didn’t. He came back the next day with his own.”
“Goldfish,” I said. I’d been wondering where all the Goldfish were going.
“He told me about his mother working nights. He told me about your husband. He told me you count everything on your thumb.” Arthur almost smiled. “He’s a talker.”
“He is.”
“I told him about Patty. Last week. That’s my fault. He wanted to see the locket and I took it out to show him and then I had it in my pocket when I went to clear the leaves out of that grate, because I didn’t want Kessler backing up into the Pruitts’ basement again like it did in May, and then it was just. Gone.” He picked up the coffee. Didn’t drink it. “I looked for three days. I was down on my knees in that ditch. Cars honking at me.”
“And Leo heard.”
“He heard me say forever.” Arthur shook his head. “I shouldn’t have said forever to a seven-year-old.”
I thought about my grandson running down Larch Street toward Kessler Road with the sky going purple, all fifty-one pounds of him, to fish a dead girl’s locket out of a storm drain for a man every child on the block was afraid of.
“I saw him from the kitchen,” Arthur said. “I was at the sink. I saw that green jacket of his go past the end of my driveway and I knew where he was going, I just knew, and I went out the door, and I don’t.” He stopped. “I don’t remember the cane. I guess I had it at the start.”
“Where was he? Exactly.”
“Down in the ditch. On his belly at the grate with his whole arm through, water coming over him. He had it. He had it in his fist and he was yelling at me that he had it.” Arthur put the mug down again. “And there’s a car coming down Kessler with its hazards on, and I’m thinking, here it is. Here’s where I find out. Fifty-one years and here it is.”
“But the car went by,” I said.
“The car went by.”
He closed the locket. The hinge held this time.
The Bucket
Kristen picked Leo up at seven the next morning, after her shift. I didn’t tell her everything. I told her enough. She stood in my kitchen in her scrubs with her coffee and looked at the window that faces Arthur’s house for a long time and then said, “The witch guy?” and I said, “Don’t,” and she didn’t.
Leo was grounded for a week, which in my house means no tablet and no fort. He took it pretty well. I think he knew he’d gotten off easy.
On Thursday I walked down to Kessler to find the cane. It was in the gutter about forty feet from the corner, wedged against a storm drain, with a Taco Bell cup jammed up next to it. Somebody’s patio umbrella was folded up in the Pruitts’ azaleas. The Hendersons’ trampoline had ended up on its side against their garage, and Gary Henderson was out there in his bathrobe staring at it like it had insulted his mother.
The cane was fine. Heavy, like I said. Real oak. There was a brass band near the bottom, and somebody had scratched initials into it, very small, almost worn away. P.P. A kid’s carving, crooked. I didn’t ask.
I knocked on his door and he opened it before I’d finished knocking, which meant he’d watched me come up the walk.
“Your cane.”
“I’ve been using a broom handle,” he said. “It’s undignified.”
He took it. He didn’t say thank you, exactly. He said, “Wait there,” and went inside, and I heard the door to the garage open.
He came back pushing a five-gallon Sherwin-Williams bucket across the floor with the end of the cane. It was full of baseballs. Old ones, yellowed, a couple with the stitching popped. A few newer ones. One softball, which I guess had been tossed in with the rest by mistake, or on purpose. I didn’t count them. For once.
“For the boy,” he said. “When he’s not grounded.”
“Arthur, these are everybody’s.”
“Then the boy can give them back to everybody,” he said. “Backyard only. Tell him. Not the front.”
I carried them home on my hip. It took two trips because the bucket was too heavy, and on the second trip the Sloan girl rode past on her bicycle, slow, staring at me like I’d come out of a haunted house alive.
Leo got un-grounded the following Wednesday. The first thing he did was go out back and dump the whole bucket in the grass and stand in the middle of it with his arms out.
He threw one too hard. Of course he did. It went over the fence, bounced twice, and rolled under the dead boxwood into Arthur’s yard.
I was halfway to the door before I saw Arthur on his back step. He’d been sitting there in Dale’s flannel shirt, which he hadn’t given back yet, with a cup of something. He set the cup down. He stood up on the oak cane, slow, one stage at a time like an old ladder.
He walked over to the ball. Bent for it. Took him a while.
Then he wound up and threw it back over the fence, underhand, terrible, and it landed about six feet short of Leo and rolled the rest of the way to his shoes.
“Again,” Leo yelled.
“Don’t push your luck,” Arthur said, and sat back down, and picked up his cup.
If you’ve got a grouchy old neighbor you’ve written off, maybe go knock on the door. You’d be surprised what’s in the pocket.
For more stories about unexpected kindness and secrets hiding in plain sight, read the woman who arrived asking for Evelyn and the book thought lost in a fire. And don’t miss what the fired cook kept behind the flour.
