She crouched in front of the boy again. The mode had shifted once more. The mode now was gentle. "Ren, my supervisor is sending someone from the agency to meet us." She will come in a different car.
She is a nice lady. Her name is Ms. Park. She is going to take you to Miss Whitford's house tonight. Miss Whitford is expecting you. There is a dog named Pepper.
There is a room with a bed. You are going to eat dinner there, and you are going to sleep in the bed. And tomorrow, some grown-ups are going to talk to each other about what happens next. That part is not your job. Your job tonight is to eat and to sleep.
Is that all right? "Yes, ma'am." Is there anything you need from anywhere before we go? The boy thought about this. "There is a bag," he said.
Behind the dumpster at the back of the church on Hadley. It has my things in it. "Then we will go and get the bag." Officer Ray said, I will drive you, Mr. Mercer. You will not be coming with us.
I understand. She stood. She helped the boy to his feet, not by lifting him, but by holding out her hand and waiting for him to take it, which he did. He looked at "Arthur." "Sir?"
"Yes, Ren?" "Thank you for the telephone call." Arthur did not trust his voice for a moment. He waited until he did. "Thank you for the wrist, Ren."
The boy made a sound that might have been a laugh if it had been allowed to grow into one. It did not quite get there, but Arthur heard the shape of it, and he understood that the shape of a laugh was a thing he was going to remember for a long time. Officer Ray led the boy to her patrol car. She opened the back door, but she did not put him in the back. She opened the front passenger door instead and helped him climb up and she buckled the seat belt around him with the careful attention of a woman who had Arthur suspected children of her own at home.
She walked around to the driver's side. She got in. She looked at Arthur once through the windshield before she pulled away. He raised one hand. She raised one back.
The patrol car pulled away. Arthur stood on the corner of Sycamore and Linden for a long time after it was gone. The men with the chainsaw started up again. The car alarm alarmed down the block, which had been wailing intermittently since the tree had come down, finally exhausted itself and went quiet. The woman with the grocery bag had long since gone inside.
He realized after some minutes that he was still holding his phone in his hand. He looked at it. He pressed Estelle's name again. She answered on the second ring. "I have not gotten any calls from any department yet."
"Arthur, you will." I am calling about something else. All right. "How much money would your house need to never have to worry about money again?" A long pause this time.
A real one. "Arthur, I am asking honestly." Estelle, I have been looking for a thing to do with what I have. I have found this morning what the thing is. "Come and see me on Saturday."
We will talk about it then. "Not on a Tuesday. Not on the telephone." "All right, "Arthur."" "Yes, he is going to be all right, the boy." Not perfect, but all right.
I want you to know that before Saturday. "Thank you, Estelle." The line went dead. Arthur did not go to his attorney's office that afternoon. He called from the corner of Sycamore and Linden and told the receptionist, a woman named Doris, who had been answering that telephone for 22 years and had never once been rude to anyone on the other end of it, that he would not be coming in today and that he would explain on Thursday.
Doris, who had heard a great many men her age cancel a great many meetings on a great many Tuesday afternoons, did not press him. She said only that she hoped he was well, and that she would put him in the book for Thursday at 10:00. He walked home instead. It was by the route he chose, almost two miles, and he had not walked two miles in one go in perhaps four years. His knees told him about it.
His left hip told him about it. He listened to what they said. He did not, by long habit, allow them to change his mind. He walked because he needed the time. He walked because the inside of a taxi or the inside of his own apartment would have been at that moment smaller than what was happening inside his chest needed in order to fit.
He walked because he had been for a long time the kind of man who solved most problems by sitting down with a yellow pad. And he understood that the thing happening to him now was not the kind of thing a yellow pad was going to solve. He thought as he walked about a great many things. He thought about his wife who had not been his wife for 33 years. Helena.
They had divorced in their mid-30s for reasons that had been at the time the right ones and had remained in the long view the right ones, but had left him without the family he had assumed at 25 he was going to have by 40. They had not had children. They had talked about children. They had postponed children. Then they had postponed each other.
Then Helena had gone to a fellowship in Edinburgh and had not come back. And he had not asked her to come back. And that had been that. He thought about his brother Edward, who had died of a heart attack at 58 on a treadmill in a hotel gymnasium in Houston. He thought about Edward's wife Margaret, who had remarried and moved to Phoenix, and who sent him a Christmas card every year that said the same six words in slightly different handwriting depending on how rushed she had been.