Eduardo's Arc

Chapter 22 of 60

By evening the hammer felt heavy. Eduardo set it down on the porch step and looked at the front door. The closet was empty. The burn barrel was cold. The house was quiet in the wrong way. He knew the shape of the thirst by now. It came back at dusk when the work stopped and there was nothing between him and the walls. He could feel the pull toward town, toward a card table, toward any hand that would take his and lead him somewhere loud. He could not sit inside that house alone tonight. He washed his face at the pump and walked into town before the light went. He did not have a plan. He knew one person who would sit with him without asking questions. The boy carried a stool everywhere and set it down beside whoever needed company. Eduardo had seen him do it for the baker and the widow at the end of the road. He had never asked for it himself. He found Emilio outside the small wooden house the town had raised him in, the one with the flower boxes and the carved arch above the door. The boy was scraping mud off his boot on the bottom step. He looked up and did not seem surprised. "Can I sit a while?" Eduardo said. Emilio picked up the stool and carried it to the porch rail. He set it down and pointed at it. Then he sat on the step himself. "You take the stool," he said. "You're taller." Eduardo laughed once, short, and sat. The stool was low. His knees came up. He felt foolish and it helped. "I don't want to be in my house tonight," he said. "Okay." "I'm not going to explain it." "Okay." They sat. A dog barked somewhere behind the houses. Emilio pulled a jar from his vest pocket and held it out. Honey, dark in the glass. "The widow says the bees know things," Emilio said. "I still don't know what." "Maybe they know when a man shouldn't be alone." Emilio thought about that. "Maybe." Eduardo told him small things. The porch step he had braced. The window he still had to glaze. The old man at the feed store who paid him on Fridays. He did not talk about the belt or the bottles or the woman who had told him never to come back. Emilio nodded at the right places and did not fill the quiet. When the lamps came on down the road, Eduardo stood. His hands were steady. The pull was still there, but it had gone small, the way a fire goes small when no one feeds it. "Thank you," he said. "Come back if you need the stool," Emilio said. Eduardo walked home in the dark. He went inside. He shut the door behind him and did not open the closet, because there was nothing left in it to open. He slept.