第11章 The Inman Rule

Vernon Inman walked to the post office every morning at nine, even though he had retired from it eleven years ago and no longer had any business there, because a man needs a route. He had walked a route for thirty-four years, and a route is a thing that gets into the body. He delivered to four hundred houses and knew which dogs were friendly and which porch steps were rotten and which widows would meet him at the door with a glass of water on a hot day. He had known every mailbox in Wellerby the way a farmer knows his fence posts. When he retired, the route had gone to a young man who did it on a truck, and Vernon had congratulated him and meant it and had gone home and sat down in the front room and had not known what to do with his hands. Ora had died the following spring. That was the order of things, and he had given it a great deal of thought over the years, and his conclusion was that the retirement had cracked the wall and the death had come through the crack, and that a man should be careful about giving up a route, because a route is not just what you walk. It is who walks with you. Now he walked to the post office and back and said good morning to the woman at the window, and once a week he stopped at the library and took out a book, which was a route of a smaller and better kind. The library tote had a hole in the corner, and he had carried books in a grocery bag for two years rather than mend it. In July he mended it. He did not know why he did it that week and not another; he got up on Tuesday and found the needle and the heavy thread and sat on the porch and stitched the corner in four minutes flat, and when he was done he looked at it and thought about the fact that he had let a two-dollar bag embarrass him for two years because mending it would have meant admitting that Ora was not coming back to do it, and that the needle and thread had been hers, and that this was, in the end, all that a tote bag was ever going to be. He brought the mended tote to the July meeting, with the book in it, and nobody noticed, which was exactly what he had wanted and exactly what he did not want, and he sat in his chair and felt the afternoon go long and slow around him like a Sunday. --- He had been thinking about leaving the circle. To be precise, he had been thinking about it for a year. He was the only man, and had been since a man named Gerald had come for two months and then moved to Florida, and he was seventy-one, and there were days when he sat in the ring of chairs and felt the whole room lean toward the middle, where the tea and the talk were, and felt himself on the edge of it like a chair that had been set out for a coat. It was not that they left him out. They never left him out. It was that they did not need him, and a person can be alone in a room full of people who are glad to see him, if he is the only one who is not being carried by the room. He had told no one. He had put the thought in his pocket in the spring and carried it around all summer, and then, in July, he had said it out loud, which he did not do on purpose, because he had taught a small boy, in 1974, in his own way, never to let a thing sit in a pocket until it wore a hole in the lining. "You should know," Vernon said, at the end of the meeting, when the cups were stacked and the others were getting their coats, "that I've been thinking about giving this up." The remaining four stopped where they were. Junie said, "Why?" "Oh, no reason worth saying." "Then don't say it," Annette said, "and don't leave, either." "Annette," Glenna said. "I'm serious. If the reason isn't worth saying, the leaving isn't worth doing. It's arithmetic." "It is not arithmetic," Vernon said, and heard his own voice sharpen, which surprised him. "The reason is that I'm old and I'm the only man and I don't carry anything into the room that anybody needs. That's the reason. There. You wanted it said." Glenna, in the window chair, did not rush at him. Neither did anyone. That was the thing about the circle that kept a person alive: it had learned to let a hard sentence stand in the air until it stopped echoing. Then Romy, who was stacking the chairs, said, "Ora's rule." Vernon looked at her. "She told me," Romy said. "Years ago. I was cleaning her sister's house and Ora was there and I said I didn't know how to help my mother, who was sick, and Ora said the thing she always said." She set a chair down. "You don't have to fix it. You just have to show up." The room was quiet. "I've carried that around for eleven years," Romy said. "I don't fix anything in this room. I set chairs and bring the ice. That's my whole contribution. By Annette's arithmetic I should have quit in 2016." "By Annette's arithmetic I should have quit in 1998," Junie said. "You're both missing the point," Annette said, "which is that I'm right." And Vernon laughed, a real one, unexpected, and then the others did, and the room, which had been about to lose him, held him the way a hand holds a cup: loosely, and without any fuss. "I'll think about it," he said. "That's all we're asking," Glenna said, which was her answer to everything, and which had never once been a lie. --- Outside, on the sidewalk, Junie and Romy were still talking about the room, in the low and practical voices they used now for that subject, and Annette was not, having walked off down the street with her bag, and Sadie had gone to help Maeve with a box, and so for a minute it was only the two old ones on the sidewalk under the maple, with the July light going amber and the cardinals carrying on in the branches. "Let me ask you something," Vernon said. "Ask." "That rule of Ora's. You said it like it was the whole thing. You don't have to fix it. You just have to show up." "That's the whole thing." "Then what's the point of the tea?" Glenna looked at him. "There's a table and a pot and eight chairs and a list of books," Vernon said. "I've been coming for seven years. If the whole thing is just showing up, I could show up at the post office. Why the room?" Glenna thought about it for a while, the way she thought, without any hurry and without any show, and the cardinals went on arguing in the tree. "Because it's hard to show up at nothing," she said. "A room is a promise you can keep. There's a table and a pot and eight chairs and a list, and every one of those things is just a way of saying: we will be here on the second Sunday, and so will you, and neither of us has to be brave about it. It's the same rule as your route. A route isn't the houses. A route is the promise that you'll come back around." Vernon was quiet for a bit. "I think I'll stay," he said. "Good," Glenna said. "We need a man with a tote." And she went off up Court Street toward her house, and he stood there under the maple a minute longer with the mended bag on his shoulder, and then he went home the long way, past the four hundred houses, and said good evening to the ones who were out on their porches, the way he always did. ---