Lives Here Too
| 16 min read
The Elantra came in on a rollback at ten after eight with its left rear quarter folded into itself, and Roy was down on one knee in the gravel shooting the wheel well when Terri leaned out of the office door and said there was a man holding on two.
"Take a number."
"He asked for Roy Alan Halbert."
He kept the camera up and took one more picture he did not need. His mother had used the middle name. The BMV used it, and a collection outfit in Dayton had used it once in 2003 about a Discover card that belonged to somebody else with the same last name and worse habits.
The phone at the parts counter was the old kind, the cord pulled out into a straight line from twenty years of people walking away with it. Roy wiped his hands down the thighs of his jeans and picked up.
"This is Roy."
"Roy Alan Halbert." An older man, unhurried, giving all four syllables the same amount of room, the way you read a name off a form.
"That's right."
"It's Kelvin."
Dean had written the week's tow-ins on the whiteboard in green marker, and Roy read the whole list down and then back up before he answered. Escalade. Two Malibus. A Ranger somebody had taken the tailgate off of in a Kroger lot.
"Kelvin," Roy said.
"Yes."
"Kelvin what?"
"You never gave me one." The man waited a beat. "You gave me yours later, but that was a different thing."
Out in the lot the compressor kicked on and Boyd started in on the Malibu's front clip with the air chisel. Roy put his finger in his other ear.
"I think you want Ron Halbert out toward Elida," he said. "People mix us up all the time. His mail comes here twice a year."
"No." No heat in it at all. "But I'll let you go. You're at work."
The man hung up first. Roy stood with the receiver against his shoulder until the dial tone came on and then went to the tone that means put it down, and he put it down.
Terri did not look up from her screen. "Who was that?"
"Warranty guy."
"Warranty guy's supposed to call me, not you." She typed something. "If he calls back, he calls me."
He went out and finished the Elantra. The owner had left a car seat in the back and a Dunkin' cup in the holder with lipstick on the lid, and the trunk would not close, so he wrote it up as needing the latch and the panel both. At eleven he sat down at the terminal to upload and found sixty-one photographs of the same quarter panel, taken from four inches to about six feet, and not one of the interior, the VIN plate, or the odometer.
The woman was still in the waiting room with her purse flat on her knees, watching the television with the sound off. Roy told her the camera had eaten the first set and he needed five more minutes. She said take your time, she wasn't going anywhere, her ride was her mother.
He took the pictures over. His hands were fine. He got the VIN and the odometer and the car seat with the crumbs in it, and he was back inside before her mother pulled up.
Mrs. Pruitt had a way of asking for the truth that made it sound like a favor she was doing you.
This was March of 1986, fifth grade, the room at Whittier with the radiator under the windows that knocked twice and quit all that spring. She had talked to his mother. She said so at the front of the room with her hands folded, not unkindly, the same voice she used for the fire drill.
"Roy, I think it would help if you told everyone yourself."
He stood up next to his desk because that was what you did when she said your name that way. Somebody's chair squeaked. He could see the back of Renata Poole's head and the ponytail holder with the two yellow beads on it.
"There isn't any Kelvin," he said.
"And?"
"I made him up."
"Thank you, Roy. That was very grown up."
Dale Sowers started clapping. Four or five others came in behind him, and one of them whistled through his teeth, and Mrs. Pruitt let it run for a while before she put her hand out flat and they stopped. She wrote the spelling words on the board. Roy sat down and copied all twenty of them and got them all right on Friday.
For the next two weeks Dale set a place at lunch. A napkin, a straw laid across it, the chair pulled out square to the table. "He's already sitting there," Dale would say, and when Roy sat down anyway Dale would say, "You're sitting on him," and the eighth graders at the end would turn around to watch. Renata laughed the first day. After that she ate down at the far corner with her back half turned, which he thought about for years afterward and never got anywhere with. It stopped in April when Dale's father lost the boat off the trailer coming back from Indian Lake and Dale had better things to talk about.
The name had come off the refrigerator in the garage. Kelvinator, in chrome script above the handle, the paint gone out of three of the letters. His father kept pop in it and a gallon of paint thinner and, in the crisper, a bag of nightcrawlers in dirt. Roy had said the word out loud one July afternoon the way you say a word you have only ever read, and after that he had somebody to say things to. Kelvin was taller than him and older, ten or eleven, and had opinions about which channel and which end of the couch. He was not afraid of the crawlspace and he thought the Sowers boy was nothing.
The summer before the classroom, when Roy was nine, he tore a strip off the bottom of his mother's grocery list and printed KELVIN HALBERT LIVES HERE TOO on it in pencil, pressing hard enough that the L went through the paper. He rolled it up and put it in an empty Sanka jar and screwed the lid down. At the back corner of the garage, where the foundation met the dirt, one brick had worked loose enough to pull out with two fingers. He scooped a hole behind it with a serving spoon, set the jar in, and pushed the brick back until it was even with the others.
After March he stayed out of the backyard. He told his mother the neighbor's dog, and she said that dog is chained, and he said he knew. In June his father sold the refrigerator to a man from Ada for fifteen dollars. Roy watched from the kitchen window while the man walked it down the drive on a two-wheeler. One of the chrome letters came off in the gravel, and his father picked it up and dropped it in the coffee can of screws on the workbench, where it probably still was when they sold the house.
Paula had the heating pad on her shoulder and half a dog crate on the living room floor. Her sister had gone to Gatlinburg for nine days and the beagle had arrived that morning with a bag of food, a squeaking hamburger, and a laminated card of instructions in Cheryl's handwriting.
"Did anybody call the house?" Roy said.
"The house phone hasn't rung since the election." She moved the pad an inch. "Why?"
"Guy called the shop asking for me by my whole name."
"That's the one where they get you to say yes." She had her phone up over her face, scrolling. "They record the yes and then there's a Sam's Club membership in Missouri with your name on it. Just block it. Don't even talk."
"I'll block it."
He put his plate in the sink and ran water over the fork longer than the fork needed. Behind him Paula read the laminated card out loud in a voice that was mostly for her sister's benefit and not his, the part about the beagle needing a scoop and a half at seven and a half scoop at four, as if the dog were on insulin.
At twenty till ten his cell went off on the counter with a 419 number he did not know.
"That's them," Paula said.
He took it out to the driveway. It had rained at supper and the concrete was drying in patches. Two houses down, the Kanes' motion light came on for nothing, the way it did.
"I'm sorry about earlier," the man said. "You were at work. I should have thought about that."
"How'd you get this number?"
"The same way anybody gets anything now."
Roy walked to the end of the drive and stood by the mailbox. "Who is this really?"
"You put it under the brick," the man said. "The corner one, at the back, the one that came out if you pulled the bottom of it. You dug the hole with a spoon out of the good drawer and you never put the spoon back."
Roy did not say anything. He had not remembered the spoon until the man said the spoon.
"You wrote it in pencil and you bore down too hard and it went through the paper at the L."
"Somebody's been talking to you."
"There isn't anybody to talk to me." Something moved on the other end, a chair leg or a cabinet. "It's not there now. That's the thing I called about."
"What isn't."
"You know what it is."
Roy took the phone away from his ear and looked at the screen a second and then hung up on him. The Kanes' light went off. He stood still long enough that it stayed off, and then he shifted his foot and it came back on and lit up the mailbox and the wet street and his own truck in the drive with the bed full of cardboard he kept meaning to take to the recycling.
Inside, Paula said, "Who was it?"
"Dean. About the Escalade bumper."
"On a Thursday night."
"He's got the adjuster coming Monday."
She let it go, or she looked like she let it go. "You're doing the thing with your jaw." She swung her legs down off the couch and winced at her shoulder and pointed at the crate with her chin. "If you're going to help me with that, help. Otherwise go to bed and I'll do it wrong and we'll both live with it."
He got down on the floor with the instruction sheet and they had it three-quarters right by eleven. The beagle watched them from the couch and then slept on the couch, and neither of them said anything about that either.
Saturday he told Paula he was going to Menards for a hose bib and drove to Corbin instead, which is fifty minutes out 117 past the elevator and the place that used to be the Dairy Freeze and is now a woman who does taxes from March to April and sells mums the rest of the year.
Fenner Street had been repaved. The house had vinyl siding the color of oatmeal and a storm door with a scrolled H in the middle of it, which he stared at from the truck for a while before he understood it was somebody else's H. The maple was gone. The stump had been ground down and the grass had come back in a ring that was greener than the rest of the yard.
A woman came out the side door with a laundry basket on her hip and saw him and stopped.
"Can I help you?"
He got out and stood by the front tire so he was not walking at her. "I grew up in this house. We moved out in ninety-one."
"Okay," she said, in the way that means keep talking.
"Halbert. Roy Halbert."
She set the basket down on the step. A little girl came to the storm door on the inside and got a fistful of the curtain and stood there.
"You're the second one," the woman said.
"Second what."
"Second Halbert." She said her own name, Ivelisse Marrero, and she said it twice because he did not catch it the first time. "A man came in March. Tall, older than you. He knew the side door sticks in August and you have to lift it, and it does. He told me the outlet in the back bedroom is dead behind the dresser, which it is, and my husband's been saying he'd get to it since we bought the place."
"What did he want?"
"He walked around back. He stood behind the garage a long time and I watched him from the kitchen the whole time with the phone in my hand." She looked at the truck and then at Roy. "He didn't do anything. He was polite. He asked me one thing that I've thought about a lot since then. He asked if my kids ever talk to anybody who isn't there."
The girl knocked on the storm door glass with one knuckle, three times, and Ivelisse said something to her in Spanish without turning around and the girl stopped.
"Can I go back there?" Roy said. "Two minutes. You can watch me the whole time."
She thought about it. "He said Halbert too," she said. "That's the only reason."
The garage was still standing with a new roof on it and the siding wrapped around it to match the house. Through the window he could see a chest freezer and a bicycle hanging from the joists by its front wheel. There was a trampoline in the middle of the yard and a kiddie pool tipped on its side with last fall's leaves stuck to the inside of it.
The bricks along the back foundation had been painted over at some point, and the paint had cracked in a straight seam down one edge. The corner brick sat out from the others by about half an inch. Roy got two fingers on the bottom of it and it came out the way it had always come out.
The hole was open. The dirt in it was loose and darker than the clay around it, and a corner of a plastic grocery bag stuck up out of the middle. He dug with his fingers past the second knuckle and then to the wrist. He got the bag out. It was a bag. Under it there was a roofing nail, orange with rust, and more clay, and nothing else, and the hole was deeper than a nine-year-old with a serving spoon could have made it.
He sat back on his heels in the wet grass and his knee let him know about it.
"He left something," Ivelisse said. She had come around the corner of the garage with the girl on her hip. "I kept it. I don't know why I kept it."
She went in and came back out and put it in his hand. A jar lid, the enamel gone yellow, the brown lettering worn off the top where a hand had turned it, the ring rusted through in one place. It had been in the drawer with the batteries and the tape measure and a church key, and it smelled faintly of that drawer.
"What did he look like," Roy said.
"Tall. A tan jacket zipped all the way up and it was seventy degrees. His hair was combed wet." She shifted the girl to the other hip. "His hands were very clean. Like he washed them right before he knocked."
Roy put the lid in his shirt pocket and got the brick back in the wall with the flat of his hand. He was at the truck before he remembered he had not thanked her, and by then the storm door had shut and the curtain had gone back the way it hangs.
He drove to the end of Fenner and stopped at the sign and did not turn. There was nobody behind him. The lid sat on the dash and rocked a little with the engine.
He found the 419 number and called it.
It rang seven times. Then the line opened, and nobody said hello, but the quiet had a room in it. A television going in another part of a house. Water moving in a pipe. A woman's voice somewhere back there saying four or five words to somebody who was not on the phone.
"Kelvin," Roy said.
The room stayed where it was. Somebody set something down on a hard surface.
"Say the rest of it," the man said.
Roy looked out the windshield at the stop sign and the gravel apron and a Pepsi can in the ditch that had been mowed over at least once.
"Kelvin Halbert lives here too."
"Again."
He said it again. He got it out flat, the way he read plate numbers to adjusters on the phone, and it came out flat the second time as well, and then the third time it did not.
"All right," the man said.
"Where are you?"
The man did not answer that. He did not hang up either. Roy sat with the phone against his ear and listened to the television and the water and the woman's voice, and after a minute he put the truck in gear.
He set the phone face up on the seat next to the lid and pulled out onto the county road and did not end the call. Past the elevator the screen said nine minutes. Past the sign for the corporation limit it said seventeen. He turned the radio off, which he had not done in years, and drove with his window down and one hand on top of the wheel.
At the county line the phone said thirty-one minutes and the room was still there on the other end. The television had gone off. Somebody pulled a chair out from a table and left it out.