Ruthie's Drawer

The sign on the door of Coombs Hardware & Marine said OPEN 7–5 MON–SAT, and at 6:58 on Friday morning Maren was parked under it with the engine off, watching her breath fog the windshield of a car that had cost her $38 a day for eleven weeks. She had slept about ninety minutes. In the passenger seat was a list she had written at 3 a.m. on the back of a Hannaford receipt, numbered one through nine. Padlock. Werther's. Who kept the radio on. Wren. Vol 34. The list continued down to Did you know about 1988, which she had underlined twice and then crossed out, because she was fairly sure of the answer and not at all sure she could hear it before coffee.

At 7:00 exactly the lights came on inside. At 7:01 Ruthie flipped the sign.

Maren didn't go in. She sat there for most of the morning while trucks pulled up and pulled away, a man in Grundéns carried out a coil of yellow line over his shoulder like a sash, and a woman walked in with a broken lamp and left without it. Twice Maren put her hand on the door handle. Once she drove to the Harbor Lunch, bought a coffee she didn't drink, and drove back to the same spot. She read the list again. It looked like a bug report. It looked, she thought, like every question she had asked Ruthie in April, rearranged, and Ruthie had answered every one of those with a question of her own about guest rooms and septic.

At 11:48 she went in.

The bell over the door was a real bell, brass, on a curl of spring steel. Ruthie was behind the counter ringing up a bilge pump for a kid of about sixteen who was paying in fives and ones. Her reading glasses were pushed up into her white hair, and she was explaining, without being asked, that the kid's uncle had bought the wrong float switch last year and she wasn't going to let it happen twice in one family.

"Tell him it's the same as the Rule he's got, only it works," she said. "Tell him I said so."

"He won't like it."

"He doesn't like anything. Go on."

The bell rang again behind him. Ruthie looked at Maren, and then at the receipt in Maren's hand, and Maren realized she was holding the list up between them like a summons. She folded it and put it in the pocket of her fleece.

"Traps working?" Ruthie said.

"Four mice."

"There's more."

"I know."

Ruthie straightened a display of Fox 40 whistles that didn't need straightening. She was waiting. Maren could feel the shape of the first question in her mouth, who bought the padlock, and she could already hear the answer: people buy padlocks, dear, it's a hardware store. She had spent fourteen years at Lumentide asking precise questions of systems that returned precise answers, and none of that was going to work here. The system in front of her was seventy-four and had been deciding for months which of Maren's questions to let through.

She let go of the list.

"What was he doing on the stairs?" Maren said. "The night he died. Why was he going up?"

Ruthie's hand stopped on the whistles.

She didn't look up. For a moment the only sound in the shop was the hum of the old Coca-Cola cooler by the door, the one that now held bait worms and Moxie. Then Ruthie took her glasses out of her hair, folded them, and put them in the breast pocket of her cardigan, and Maren had the strange sense of watching somebody take off a uniform.

"Took you long enough," Ruthie said.

She came around the counter, walked past Maren to the door, turned the sign to CLOSED, and shot the deadbolt. The clock over the paint counter said 11:57. Ruthie looked at it, seemed to decide three minutes was close enough, and said, "Upstairs."

---

The stairs went up behind the paint-mixing machine, narrow and steep, with a rope handrail threaded through iron eyes. Maren counted them without meaning to. Fourteen. At the top was a door with a brass knob worn bare on one side, and behind it an apartment that smelled like percolator coffee and Jergens lotion and, very faintly, something Maren couldn't place until she was all the way inside and then placed all at once.

Old Spice.

It wasn't strong. It was the kind of smell that lived in fabric. A navy wool watch cap hung on a peg by the door, beside a woman's raincoat and a canvas tote from the Camden library. On the floor under the peg was a pair of size-thirteen Xtratufs, the brown kind, with the left heel worn down at an angle Maren recognized from somewhere she didn't want to examine.

"I keep meaning to give those to the Legion," Ruthie said, and did not.

The room looked over Water Street through two tall windows. There was a plaid couch, a television with rabbit ears on top as though somebody didn't trust cable, and against the far wall a gray steel desk of the kind that turned up at government auctions, dented at one corner, with a green blotter and a mug of pens. Ruthie went straight to it. She unlocked the top right drawer with a key from the ring on her belt, and as she sorted for it Maren saw, on the same ring, a stubby brass key stamped MASTER.

"That's the padlock," Maren said.

"It is."

"You told me you never had a key."

"I told you I never had a key to that building." Ruthie found the one she wanted. "When you got here, I didn't. I'd put it in this drawer the morning I found him and I didn't touch it till you'd been here a week and I figured you'd sell to that Farrow man and some kid from Portland would pitch the whole room in a dumpster. So I went out. Twice. Turned the radio back on. He never shut it off, not in thirty-five years, and I couldn't stand thinking of it cold." She looked at Maren over the drawer. "And then you went and cut my lock."

"The Werther's."

"He always had them. I thought you should know that much." Ruthie pulled the drawer open. "I'm not proud of the rest of it. Sit down."

Maren sat on the edge of the couch. Ruthie took things out one at a time and set them on the coffee table between them, the way Maren had once watched a bomb-disposal team on television lay out the parts of something they'd made safe.

A green ledger, the same cheap cardboard-cornered kind as the thirty-three in the oil house. Its cover had a dark stain across the bottom third and a dent in one corner, and the spine was cracked so the book wouldn't quite close. On the front, in her father's blocky capitals: 34.

A smaller notebook, black, a Boorum & Pease with a cloth spine, swollen as if it had once gotten wet and dried badly.

A white envelope, long, unsealed, with the flap tucked in.

And a shoebox. Stride Rite, child's size. Ruthie set it down last and kept her hand on the lid a second longer than she needed to.

"He had the ledger with him," Ruthie said. "When he fell. It was under him."

Maren looked at the stain on the cover and stopped looking at it.

"Fog came in the night of the eighth, around eleven. I could see it from here, coming up the harbor. He'd have gone up to the lantern room to look. He did that, even though he had the radar. Said the radar told you where things were and the window told you what kind of night it was." Ruthie sat down in the armchair across from Maren, hands on her knees. "I called at seven the next morning like I always did. He didn't answer. That's not unusual, he's terrible on the phone, you know that. I called again at eight. I drove out at quarter past."

"You don't have to—"

"I know I don't." Ruthie's voice stayed flat. "He was at the bottom. About four steps from the bottom, really. The doctor said it was his heart first and the stairs after, and I've decided to believe her. The book was under his chest. His glasses were still on the leash." She touched her own cardigan pocket. "I took the book before I called anybody. I knew what he wanted done with it. He'd told me enough times."

"What did he want?"

"He wanted me to give it to you when you asked the right question." Ruthie almost smiled. "That's how he put it. Like a fairy tale. I said, Walt, what's the right question, and he said, You'll know it when she asks it. Which was no help at all, which was typical." She nodded at the receipt sticking out of Maren's fleece pocket. "You came in here in April asking who kept the light on and who bought the lock and who's this boat in the book. All about the room. You never once asked about him."

Maren opened her mouth and closed it.

"I'm not scolding," Ruthie said. "I'm explaining why I was such a pill."

The shoebox sat between them. Maren reached for the ledger instead, because it was the thing she knew how to handle, and opened it to the first page. 18 Dec 22. The F/V Wren, the girl alone, the same entry she had found at the end of volume thirty-three, carried forward on a fresh page in the way her father always started a new book, with the last line of the old one copied out so nothing fell between. She flipped forward. Fifty-odd pages of fog. She knew she would photograph every one of them before she read them properly, and she knew she wouldn't wait.

But Ruthie had leaned forward and lifted the lid off the shoebox, and Maren put the ledger down.

Cards. Envelopes, really, standing on end in two rows, packed tight, the way people file recipes. The ones at the back were yellowed, the ones at the front still white. Every one was addressed in the same blocky capitals.

MAREN BRANNOCK.

Maren took the first one out of the back row. An address on Fair Oaks Boulevard in Sacramento, the apartment she and her mother had lived in from fourth grade until Linda married Gary. A purple 29-cent stamp, an American flag over Mount Rushmore. No postmark. Nobody had ever handed it to a mail carrier.

She took out the next one. Same address, same stamp. The one after had a 32-cent stamp. Then 33. Then the address changed to the dorm at UC Davis, Tercero Hall, which her father could not possibly have known, except there it was, and the room number was correct. Then a rental on F Street in Davis. Then Sunnyvale. Then the apartment on Escuela Avenue in Mountain View where she had lived for the last nine years and where, four months ago, she had packed up a box of mugs and a monitor riser and a pothos clipping in a jar.

The stamps climbed through the decades like a growth chart. 34. 37. 39. 41. Then the round gold Liberty Bell Forever stamps, and later flags, and later something with a lighthouse on it that she could only guess he had found extremely funny.

"Thirty-one," Ruthie said. "I counted. One every year from ninety-three on."

"He knew where I lived."

"He always knew where you lived."

"How?"

Ruthie lifted one shoulder. "He asked your mother, early on, I think. After that he had ways. He wasn't a stupid man. He just couldn't use a telephone."

"He could use a stamp." Maren's voice came out wrong, too high. "He bought a stamp. Thirty-one times he went to the post office, or wherever, and bought a stamp, and put it on, and then didn't put it in a mailbox. That's not forgetting. That's a decision you make thirty-one times."

"Yes," Ruthie said. "It is."

Maren put the Mountain View card back in its slot without opening it. She couldn't. Not here, with someone watching. She lined it up with the others so the edges matched and then sat with both hands flat on her knees, the way Ruthie was sitting, and only noticed afterward that she was copying her.

"You're going to want to know about me," Ruthie said.

"I didn't—"

"You're going to. So." Ruthie looked at the windows. Out on Water Street somebody tried the shop door, rattled it, read the sign and went away. "Twenty years. Give or take. Since the winter of oh-four, when his furnace quit and he came in here for a part I didn't have, and I drove him to Belfast to get it, and we stopped at the Chocolate Grille on the way back. Twenty years Thursdays and Sundays and most of the in-between. He asked me to move out to the point I don't know how many times. Every Christmas, regular as a tide table."

"And you didn't."

"I have a store. I have stairs I'm used to." Ruthie's mouth worked. "And that house was full. You understand me? There wasn't room. He had you in it, and he had those two boys from the Constance Grey in it, and he had that light he wasn't allowed to keep anymore, and I wasn't going to sit in the kitchen and compete with a building."

Maren looked at the watch cap on its peg, and the boots.

"Nobody in town knew?"

"Everybody in town knew." Ruthie snorted. "This is Port Ellery. Carol at the co-op knew before I did. People just didn't say. It's a thing we're good at here, not saying. You may have noticed."

"I noticed."

"Well." Ruthie picked up the black notebook and the envelope and held them out. "Then you'll want these too, and you'll want to read them somewhere I'm not."

The notebook was lighter than it looked. Maren opened the cover. Inside, on the first ruled page, her father's capitals were smaller and less steady than in the ledgers, as though the pen had been pushing against something.

15 Oct 88. Private. Not for the station log. The station log is a lie and I wrote it. What follows is what happened.

That was as far as she could make herself read. She closed it and laid her palm on the cover. The envelope had no stamp. It was addressed, in the same hand, to MRS. CALVIN PELLETIER AND FAMILY, and below that, smaller, as if added later: AND SAM. The flap was tucked in, not sealed, and the paper inside was thick enough to be several pages.

"He wrote that in eighty-nine," Ruthie said. "He showed me once. Said he'd mail it the day he was brave enough. He used to take it out every October and put it back." She paused. "Sam Pelletier's going to need to see that at some point. I'm not the one to hand it to him."

"Neither am I."

"Ayuh, well." Ruthie said it like a door closing. "You're what's left."

Maren picked up the ledger again, because it was a ledger and she knew what to do with ledgers, and turned to the back. The last pages were February. The handwriting held steady right to the end, the 24-hour times, the boats she now half recognized from her spreadsheet. A Lisette in January. A Patience with a dead compass. Then a run of mornings with only one name, again and again, sea smoke and snow showers and the same small boat. Her father had been seventy-seven. He had been climbing ninety-one stairs in the dark to look out a window.

The last entry was halfway down the page. Under it the paper was blank, and the blankness went on for the rest of the book.

7 Feb 24. 0610. Sea smoke, vis nil. F/V Wren, plotter froze off R4. Talked her through on 68. Wren in safe. Told her nothing. Same as always.

No personal word at the end. No Coffee, no Cold. Maren read it four times, then turned back a page and forward again as though another line might have hidden itself in the gutter. There wasn't one.

"Who is she?" Maren said. "The Wren. Who is it he never told?"

Ruthie stood up and went to the window and stood looking down at Water Street with her arms folded, at the one blinking light and the co-op beyond it and the gray water past that.

"That one isn't mine," she said. "Go ask Ev Thibodeau what he's been telling people since the funeral. Then you'll know who to ask next."