There is a question making its rounds at the shop about me these days, a friendly one, which is where I get to when I leave at five. So I will give the shop this one Tuesday and let it stand in for the rest, because my days are near enough the same that any single one of them will do.
Mornings I am down in the post-office lobby a little past eight for my own box, and afternoons I sit up front at the shop, where I can keep the door and the street both under my eye at once. The shop sign went over to CLOSED at five on the dot that Tuesday, and I put my coat on, and out I went into an evening so long and mild the town might have been showing off on purpose.
I went down Main the long side, past the gardens, everybody out in theirs with the light holding. And in the third yard up from the corner, in front of the low white house where the widow keeps her roses, a FOR SALE sign stood new in the grass with the house behind it shut up tight, every curtain pulled to.
Now that is a house that never goes up for sale, and I knew it standing there on the walk as sure as I know my own front door. She has been out in that garden every fair evening I have walked this street for twenty-odd years, ever since she was left alone, and those roses along the south fence were her husband's before ever they were hers, which is a thing the whole street knows and she has said herself at the plant-sale table more than once.
By suppertime the town had a story built up around that shut house and its new sign, and it was the wrong one, so I took the long side home to hear how far it had run.
My first stop was the bench outside the market, where a woman I have known forty years was telling two others that the widow had sold the place and gone off to her daughter's for good, and wasn't it a shame, that garden going to strangers. I gave her back that the diner had its pie man in again and the road crew was starting on the bridge come Monday, which is worth about what she had given me, and I went on up the block.
Two doors up I fell in with a man watering his front step, who had watched the sign go into the ground that afternoon and could tell me who put it there. It was not the widow. It was her son, up from the valley, who had let the man in to drive the sign and stood in the yard with his arms folded while the post went down. I gave him the news that the hardware had got its screen doors in, which he had been waiting on, and I went along up the street with the son on my mind.
My last stop was the back fence behind the white house, where the widow's neighbor was taking in her wash. The widow, she told me, was only down at her daughter's until her knee came back under her. She had phoned this neighbor not three days back to say she meant to be home for the strawberry social, and would somebody please keep the slugs off her roses. So the woman was coming home, and soon, with no more notion her house was for sale than the roses had. I left the neighbor the word that the church was short a driver for the social, which she is just the sort to step up for, and I turned for home with the whole of it straight in my head.
Now the street would have taken that truth and been glad of it. Tell them a son had put his mother's house up for sale behind her back, and by Friday it would be over the county line, and the son would wear it the rest of his days and the widow beside him. But you do not shame a whole family out loud, dear, only to spare one woman a wrong story. And letting it ride was no small thing either, because the tale going around had her selling the place and walking off from her own roses, and that kind of story sticks to a house and does not come off. So the truth out loud would not do, and my own silence would not do, and I walked the last block working out who I could say one true sentence to that would put it right and travel no farther.
I know the ears in this town by where each one carries. The woman on the market bench would have it to all of Main by dark, so she was no good to me. The son would only dig his heels in and drive the sign deeper if a neighbor came at him with it. But the man whose name was down on the sign, the one who handles the selling, his line runs to the county and to the family and to not one soul on this street, and no man in that trade can afford a house he has no clear leave to sell. So it was the fellow with the sign, and no other ear, that I wanted.
I caught him at his office before it shut for the day, and I gave him the one sentence I had come to give. I said I understood the widow was only down at her daughter's until her knee mended, and did he know she was meaning to be home for the strawberry social, because I would hate to see a mix-up over a house that was not standing empty. That was the whole of it. He thanked me for stopping in, and something crossed his face that told me he had got himself into more than he had known, and I left him to put it right.
The sign was gone out of the grass by Thursday morning, and I only know it because I take my walks past there now for no reason worth naming. The town never did get the truth of it, which was the whole of what I was after, and the wrong story wore thin for want of anybody left to feed it. Nobody on the street ever knew there had been a thing to put right at all.
Then home to my own supper, dear, and an hour with my book by the lamp, and to bed in good time, for the lobby opens at eight and I am always first in line at my own box.
The widow is home now, out among her roses of an evening with her curtains open to the street and no sign in the yard, and I go by at my own pace on my way to the box, the same as I always have.