The Cummins diesel in my Peterbilt had a little hitch in the injectors around mile marker two hundred outside of Binghamton, but I didn’t stop. I couldn’t stop. Arthur was gone, and I had fourteen hundred miles of asphalt between the North Dakota oil patch and our brick house in Kingston to figure out how to breathe without him.
The transmission gave a little whine every time I shifted down into fifth, same as it had for three years. I kept my foot heavy on the pedal.
I just kept thinking about the garden hose out back by the spigot that I hadn’t rolled up before I left in March. Arthur always fussed about kinks in the green rubber. He liked things neat. He liked things laid out straight on the concrete hook.
When I pulled into the gravel drive at 4:14 on a Tuesday afternoon, the Buick was missing from the carport. That was the first wrong note. Arthur never went anywhere on a Tuesday afternoon because that was when the local hardware store delivered his bulk crickets for the bluegills he kept in the stock tank behind the shed.
The front door wasn’t locked. Arthur always swore by the double deadbolt I put in back when the copper thefts started hitting the county roads, but the brass knob just turned under my palm with a dry click. The hallway smelled like furniture polish and those little lemon drop candies he kept in the glass dish by the telephone.
“Arthur?” I called out. My voice sounded gravelly from four days of stale heater air and black coffee.
The house stayed quiet. Dust motes floated in the slant of yellow sun coming through the lace curtains on the side window. I dropped my canvas duffel by the umbrella stand and noticed the mail piled three inches deep on the oak drop-front desk. Most of it was junk. Circulars from the tractor supply and utility bills with past-due stamps in red ink.
The phone on the wall started ringing right then, making that sharp, mechanical double-chirp that always made Arthur jump. I picked it up on the third ring.
“Arthur, you get those sink washers yet?” a man’s voice asked without saying hello. It was old man Vance from the lumberyard.
“It’s Dwayne,” I said. “Arthur passed away, Mr. Vance. Sunday morning at the hospital.”
There was a long, heavy pause on the other end of the line, just the sound of a table saw whining in the background over at Vance’s shop.
“Dwayne,” the old man said, his voice dropping an octave. “Well, damn.
I thought that was him walking past the hardware twenty minutes ago. Must’ve been his brother or something. Though I didn’t know he had a brother.”
“He didn’t,” I said, and the receiver felt suddenly very heavy in my palm.
I didn’t wait for Vance to finish his condolences. I hung up the phone and walked straight back out to the truck. The trip had taken everything out of my bones, but the real work didn’t start until I got to the funeral home on Washington Avenue.
The parking lot was packed with cars I didn’t recognize. Station wagons with out-of-state plates and dusty pickup trucks from up near the reservoir. I walked up the stone steps in my good boots, the ones with the steel toes I’d shined in the cab of the rig with an old shop rag.
Inside, the chapel smelled like heavy lilies and cold marble. The folding chairs were already filling up with folks from the church and the union hall.
I spotted the guestbook on its mahogany stand right by the double doors.
That was when I saw her.
She was standing right beside the table, smoothing down the corner of the black leather cover with a hand that wore a plain gold band. She wasn’t crying. She had a look about her like she was checking off items on a grocery list. Two boys were standing behind her, both of them with that same narrow nose and crooked grin Arthur had worn in every family picture since we bought the place back in ninety-two.
I stopped three feet short of the podium. “Excuse me,” I said.
The woman looked up. Her eyes were a pale, washed-out blue, like denim that had been through the agitator a thousand times. She didn’t look scared or surprised to see a stranger standing there in a road-dusty denim shirt.
“Can I help you find a seat?” she asked. Her voice was flat, carrying that flat Kingston drawl that didn’t go up at the ends.
“I’m Dwayne,” I said, and my hand twitched toward my belt buckle out of pure habit. “Arthur was my husband.”
The woman didn’t blink. She turned the guestbook slightly so the page faced me. Her handwriting was neat, slanted slightly to the left in black ink from a fountain pen. Underneath Arthur’s signature, she had written four words in a firm, steady hand.
“His loving wife,” I read out loud. I read it four times because the letters wouldn’t stay still in my head. “Evelyn Price.”
“My name’s Evelyn,” she said, and she reached out to close the book, but my hand came down hard on the leather cover.
“I’ve lived in that brick house on Maple Street for thirty-four years,” I said, and my teeth felt like they were grinding together. “We got married in the county courthouse in Albany on a rainy Thursday in October of ninety-two. Who the hell are you?”
Before she could answer, Mr. Henderson, the funeral director who had buried my own daddy ten years back, appeared at my elbow. He looked uncomfortable, his starched collar biting into the fat of his neck as he shifted his weight from one polished loafer to the other. He lowered his voice so nobody in the third row could catch it.
“She arrived before you, Dwayne,” Henderson muttered, staring hard at his clipboard like it held the secrets of the universe. “She brought the boys at nine this morning. She had the paperwork.”
Evelyn reached into her black handbag and pulled out a folded piece of heavy cream paper, the kind they use for official county certificates. She didn’t shove it at me; she just laid it flat on the mahogany stand right beside the white carnations.
“We got married in Peekskill,” she said quietly. “Nineteen eighty-seven. He told me he had to work the oil rigs out west for months at a time. Said the company required him to use his middle name for the contracts so he wouldn’t get mixed up in union disputes down south. Arthur Thomas. That’s what the license says.”
I looked down at the paper. The seal was embossed in gold ink that caught the dim light of the overhead chandelier. The date was clear enough. May 14, 1987. Five years before Arthur and I stood before a justice of the peace in Albany with two witnesses from the diner across the street.
“He told me he was single,” I whispered, and the words tasted like copper in my mouth.
“He told me he was working,” Evelyn replied, and for the first time her voice cracked just a little bit, right around the edges. “Every spring when the maple syrup run started, he’d pack a duffel bag and head up toward the border for three weeks. Said the maintenance contracts paid double up there. I reckon he was just driving south instead.”
The two boys behind her didn’t say a word. The older one, maybe thirty with his daddy’s broad shoulders, just stared at the floor between my boots. He didn’t look mad. He looked tired. The kind of tired you only get from working double shifts on a framing crew when the weather’s turning against you.
“He had a gold ring,” I said, reaching blindly into my pocket and pulling out the heavy band I’d taken off Arthur’s left hand at the hospital. I laid it on the guestbook right next to her cream paper.
She looked down at it. Inside the band, where the jeweler had stamped the initials A.T. and the date, the numbers matched hers down to the letter. 1987. The ring I’d given him in ninety-two was sitting in his cedar jewelry box back on Maple Street, engraved with our own date and a verse from Proverbs he’d picked out himself.
“He was a good provider,” Evelyn said softly, and she didn’t sound like she was defending him. She sounded like she was reciting an inventory of stock she’d already paid for. “Brought money home every other Friday like clockwork. Never missed a mortgage payment on the house in Newburgh. Built that back deck with his own hands the summer the twins were born.”
“He built our deck too,” I said.
Nobody said anything after that for a long minute. The organist in the front started playing a slow, heavy version of ‘Amazing Grace’ that sounded like lead weights dropping into an empty bucket.
I didn’t stay for the service. I walked back out through the double doors into the parking lot where my Peterbilt was idling, blowing a little gray smoke into the damp afternoon air. The cab was still warm from the run down from the Thruway. I climbed up into the driver’s seat, pulled the door shut until the latch caught with a solid, heavy thud, and sat there with my hands resting on the rubber-gripped steering wheel.
The next morning, I went down to the county clerk’s office behind the old wool mill before they even unlocked the front doors.
The clerk was a woman named Brenda who had gone to school with my sister back when the high school still had a vocational wing. She didn’t look up when I pushed the request form across the scarred wooden counter.
“You want the vital statistics for Kingston or the county line?” she asked, her fingers hovering over the keys of an IBM electric typewriter that looked older than my boots.
“Give me everything under Arthur Thomas and Arthur Miller between eighty-five and ninety-five,” I said.
It took Brenda twenty minutes to dig through the ledger drawers in the back room. When she came back out, she dropped three different marriage certificates on the counter between us. One was Evelyn’s from Peekskill in eighty-seven. One was mine from Albany in ninety-two. The third was from a little town down near Poughkeepsie, dated 1984, featuring a woman named Clara who had signed her name with a shaky hand and listed her occupation as a seamstress at the overall factory.
Clara had been dead since ninety-one, according to the marginal note stamped in purple ink by some clerk who probably retired thirty years ago.
“Busy man,” Brenda muttered, pulling off her reading glasses and rubbing the bridge of her nose where the wire had left two red dents. “Never saw him down here under Miller, though. He used his middle name for the first two and his last name for yours, Dwayne. Smart enough to keep the counties separate. The state computers didn’t talk to each other back then like they do now.”
“Yeah,” I said. “He was real organized.”
I walked back out to the truck and drove over to the house on Maple Street. The mail was still piled on the drop-front desk. I didn’t turn on the lights. I went straight through the kitchen and out to the back shed where Arthur kept his tools in neat rows above the workbench.
There was a metal lockbox sitting on the top shelf behind the cans of boiled linseed oil. Arthur always said it had his discharge papers from the National Guard inside. I took a flathead screwdriver from the pegboard and wedged it under the latch. The metal gave way with a sharp, ugly pop that sounded like a gunshot in the small shed.
Inside weren’t military papers. There were three checkbooks from different banks in three different towns, all of them showing steady deposits from the oil terminal and regular withdrawals for mortgages and insurance premiums. There were three sets of birth certificates for the boys, and three separate wallets containing driver’s licenses with Arthur’s face on every single one of them, under three different names.
The phone on the kitchen wall started ringing while I was standing there with the metal box in my lap. I didn’t rush. I walked back inside through the screen door, letting it slam behind me the way Arthur always hated.
I picked up the receiver on the fourth ring.
“Dwayne?” Evelyn’s voice came through clear and sharp, without any static on the line. “I found the extra deed to the lot behind the Newburgh house. He had it listed under his mother’s maiden name. You need to come down here and sign off on the probate before the county takes the tax lien.”
I looked out the kitchen window at the green garden hose, coiled up neat and proper on the concrete hook by the spigot, just the way Arthur liked it.
“Evelyn,” I said, and my hand didn’t shake once. “You go on down to the courthouse yourself. I left the front doors of the funeral home unlocked when I drove off yesterday afternoon, and I reckon that guestbook is still sitting right where you left it.”
She was quiet for a long second, just breathing into the mouthpiece the way people do when they realize the floor they’re standing on has finally given way.
“He promised me the papers were filed,” she whispered, and her voice sounded smaller now, like she was talking to herself in an empty room. “Tell me why…”
“He didn’t file papers, Evelyn,” I said. “He just filed us.”
I hung up the phone, walked out to the Peterbilt, and pulled the release knob on the fifth wheel. The rig slid out from under the trailer with a heavy metal clank that echoed off the brick walls of the house. I put it in gear, pulled out of the drive without looking back at the garden hose, and pointed the nose north toward the open road where things stayed the way you left them.
