The Locals

by Jonathan Dee

  “Oh my God, the lady that works in the post office now?” Amy said. “She is so fat! She is seriously so fat that she was breathing hard just standing there. She has like no wrists.”

  “She doesn’t have wrists?” Boyd said. “I’m sure you’re wrong about that.”

  “One thing about me,” Amy said, “is I’m never wrong. You should have picked up on that by now.”

  Without ever really making up her mind to do so, Haley started finding excuses for not hanging around with them outside of school. First they acted like it was nothing, then they acted all weird and hurt about it, and then they went back to acting like it was nothing again. It meant more time at home: more Saturday nights, more lazy vacation days where she tried her hardest to sleep as long as she could. Her mother couldn’t accept that nothing was wrong. “What’s the matter with you?” she said. “I don’t mean it like that; I mean what’s wrong, what happened? Did you and your friends have a fight? Did something happen with some boy? Why don’t you want to see your friends anymore?”

  She did want to see her friends, just in their right context, in their friendship’s particular ecosystem. Her mother claimed she was worried about depression—everybody knew what crucial, fraught years these were for kids, girls especially—and she annoyingly monitored Haley’s every meal, to make sure she was eating normally, whatever that meant. Haley knew her mother’s anxiety was real, but she also knew it had more than one source. She understood that imperfectly, though still better than her mother did. Her mother did not want to be the mother of a child with problems. Not that she was superficial, not really, no more than anyone else at least. More that she felt like Haley was the face their family showed to the world. It wasn’t that she was one of those mothers for whom everything had to be perfect; it was more like, if we aren’t raising a happy child together, then what are we doing together at all?

  Because they argued a lot. It made them feel bad but they could no longer seem to help it. Dad complained that he had to do everything, be the breadwinner and do all the domestic household stuff too; Mom said that was because he worked at home and had lots of time on his hands, while she had a job; he said that if that was the problem then she could certainly quit her job since they didn’t need the money and he didn’t understand why she held on to it anyway; she refused; at some point one of them would complain about something that happened years ago, the other would say, “I cannot believe you’re bringing that up again,” and then they were off to the races.

  Sometimes, just to get out, she would go to the Howland public library and hang with, or near, her Aunt Candace. It was usually pretty dead there, but in a good way. There was a Children’s Room with a soundproof door, often crowded on weekdays, especially if the weather was bad. The mothers sat in there, amidst the noise, looking weary. Out in the main reading room Haley mostly looked through magazines, or bounced around on the internet. Candace sat behind the checkout desk, reading a book, looking up from it and out the window, sometimes, to watch the people walking by. On occasion she’d give Haley a five and send her down the street to a new place called The Beanery to bring back some decent coffee.

  The attraction to Aunt Candace was hard to explain. In terms of female role models in the family, she was Haley’s only alternative to her mother, but that wasn’t really it, Candace wasn’t a role model exactly. She exuded a vague dissatisfaction. She was sarcastic but did not complain. She didn’t, or didn’t seem to, give a lot of thought to how she looked. Only once did she ask Haley what she was doing in the library in the first place.

  “Nothing,” Haley said, a little defensively.

  “I can see that.” Her aunt examined her. “Everything okay at home?”

  “What? Yes. God. If it’s a problem for me to be here, I can go.”

  But she didn’t move. At length Candace shrugged and said, “Well, look, if you’re going to hang out here, you have to at least read something. I mean seriously. Read the paper or something.”

  So Haley read the paper. It caused her some anxiety, not because of what was in it, but because it was impossible to read all of it and so you always felt like you were being lazy and missing something important. The Globe was a little less stressful in this regard than the Times, but not by much.

  One Tuesday in March she came back with two large Americanos and there were two kids roughly her age, a boy and a girl, sitting in the Periodicals section, not because they were reading periodicals but because that’s where the softest chairs were. “Nothing for me?” the boy said to Haley, smiling, and the girl slapped him on the arm. There was still an empty chair right next to them but she thought it would be too weird to sit there when the whole rest of the library was empty, so she walked up and down the stacks for a bit, discreetly staring over the lid of her cup. Occasionally they said something to each other in a whisper but mostly they just sat in silence, as if the silence were what they had come for. From some angles Haley thought she recognized the girl and from others not. They certainly didn’t go to her school. They didn’t appear, from their body language, to be more than friends. He wore a knit ski hat and an old green fatigue jacket. She had very short hair and four earrings and fingerless gloves that she never took off.

  The next day they were back again. Now and then they checked their phones but mostly they just sat together, calmly, like brother and sister, though they looked nothing alike. “Friends of yours?” Aunt Candace whispered to her. Haley shook her head no.

  “There’s six chairs over there, you know,” Candace said. “You don’t have to feel like they marked the territory.”

  Her aunt seemed strangely at home inside the library, Haley thought. It was warm and quiet, narcotic, and there didn’t seem to be much actual work to do. Haley mouthed the word “Coffee?” to her and Candace smiled and reached for her purse. On her way out, Haley slowed as she passed the Periodicals section and said, trying for sarcasm, “Anything for you?”

  The boy and girl looked up. “No thank you,” the girl said, and the boy said, “Large latte?” Haley waited until he reached into his pants pocket and pulled out four dollars. “This is the coolest library ever,” he said.

  She returned with three coffees, handed one to her aunt, and then returned to the Periodicals section.

  “You’re here a lot,” the boy said.

  “So are you,” said Haley, “but you don’t read anything.”

  “It’s a free country,” he said, and for some reason the girl laughed, like this was some inside joke. “You and the library lady seem tight, what’s up with that?”

  “She’s my aunt.”

  “No way. What’s her name?”

  “Candace.”

  He nodded. “Very cool,” he said.

  “If you guys want to talk,” Candace said from her desk across the floor, “maybe go in the Children’s Room?”

  They stared at her.

  “I mean it,” she said softly. “I have to maintain a certain atmosphere around here. It’s not out of the question that somebody could walk in.”

  So they went into the Children’s Room and let the heavy door swing shut behind them. Awkwardly, there was a mother in there, sitting on a window seat watching her son fit together some Duplo train tracks. She had earbuds in.

  “I remember those,” the boy said about the train tracks. “So you just come here to hang out and get your aunt coffee?”

  “Yeah. And to get out of my house,” Haley said, thinking that might make an impression on him, which it did not. “What about you?”

  “Just killing time. I mean we like it here, it’s very chill. But basically we’re just waiting to meet some people.” The girl glared at him. “Chill,” he said.

  “Where do you guys go to school?” She cursed that as a dumb question even as she asked it.

  “Regional.” They did not ask Haley where she went to school. It was probably written right on her, she thought.

  “So killing time until what?”

  “Progressi
ve dinner,” he said, and this time when the girl glared fiercely at him he leaned further forward and avoided her eyes. “It’s like a semi-weekly thing. You know what a progressive dinner is?”

  “I think so. Like a different dish or course or whatever at each house, right?”

  “Correct. See, Becca? I’ve told you before, I am an excellent judge of people. I’m Walker, by the way.”

  He said he couldn’t invite Haley that night because it would be too rude if people hadn’t been told in advance she was coming; but there was another one scheduled for next Wednesday. She wasn’t sure she knew what he was talking about. But she asked her mom for permission to go out Wednesday and her mom seemed relieved to say yes, even though it was a school night. She had to walk a long way to meet them, almost to the triangular intersection where Daisy’s was.

  Only Walker was there, which was odd and, for a moment, frightening: what kind of horror-movie scenario had she been naïve enough to walk into? But he smiled his stoner smile and said, “Come on, everybody else is in the woods,” and he slipped between a pair of trees onto what she supposed was a path and it was already so close to darkness she had no choice but to follow him. When her eyes were fully adjusted he stopped and she saw they were in a kind of circular, trampled clearing. There were four or five other people squatting or lying there but it was too dark to make out their faces. Again she had a kind of flash-forward where she saw herself being raped or killed. She almost turned and ran. She heard the sound of someone crushing a beer can.

  “Okay,” Walker said in his ordinary voice, which startled her. “Progressive dinner?”

  With a few muted noises of assent they all rose. The moon was out by now, and she was able to follow the shoulders of the silent kids in front of her and even to differentiate the one other girl (who was not Becca) from the boys. They walked confidently between the birches and the pines and then it grew vaguely lighter in front of Haley’s eyes as they started to emerge from the woods again.

  They were behind a house, a fancy one, silent and moon-shadowed. No lights were on and the driveway was empty. It was a summer place, undoubtedly. The lawn was raked and neat but that was something the people who owned this kind of a house would pay locals to do for them, until the weather warmed enough for them to return.

  She wanted to ask who lived here, but everyone had gone silent. The six of them walked quickly from the woods across the grass to the house, where they flattened themselves under the eaves as if to protect themselves from rain. Walker reached up and removed his hat, with such solemnity that Haley almost expected the others to do the same, but then he briskly put the hat over his fist and punched through one of the small panes beside the door. They all listened for a moment and heard nothing. Walker shook the hat off his hand, reached carefully through the hole he’d made, unlocked the door, and they were in.

  Though spacious, it was certainly not as large as the house where Haley lived. Still, it was like a portal to some other world, a world of casually limitless means, indulgent of limitless attention to detail. Every piece of furniture, every plate, every fixture matched and shone. Decorated, she thought, or designed, more than lived in—yet people did live in it sometimes; framed photos of them hung from the triangle of wall between the staircase landing and the second floor, photos Haley could not bring herself to look at. She was terrified to think what they might have come there to do—steal, destroy things, set fire to the place—but the answer turned out to be nothing much. They just hung out there; and indeed, a few of them opened up their backpacks and brought out food to share for dinner. Somebody opened the fridge and hissed “Fuckers!” when it turned out to be empty, but in the brief automatic light from the open door she got a look at most of their faces, and they seemed like normal faces, grinning kids’ faces. A couple of them pulled out of their backpacks cigarettes, a pipe, a bottle of Jager. They sat in the living room of these wealthy, absent strangers and got a buzz on and talked. Laughing, almost like play-acting; Haley thought how incredibly violated these people would feel when they came back, around Memorial Day probably, and saw that their home (well, one of their homes) had been entered, walked around in. They’d search frantically for what was missing. She almost felt like leaving them a note, saying no, don’t freak out, it wasn’t like that.

  When all the dope and liquor and food were gone, they took a little mock-formal tour of the house. “Here we see the bones of our ancestors,” Walker said in a sort of British accent, “and on your left is the crapper, designed specially by Frank Lloyd Wright.” But nobody defaced or damaged anything. Their presence, they understood, was the defacement. In high spirits they went back out the rear door, their boots crunching on the glass, and closed it behind them.

  When they were back on the path and deep enough into the woods that she felt it safe, Haley said, “So, it is just one house in a night, right?”

  Walker laughed. “Yeah,” he said. “ ‘Progressive’ in the sense of, like, a lifetime.”

  In the light from her own porch, exhausted, Haley checked her boots and cuffs for mud. She entered her house through the kitchen; it was late, but her dad only asked if she’d been warm enough, and her mom didn’t say anything to her at all.

  —

  Daisy’s, a business whose margins had been thin for two generations, began to take on the look of an enterprise that was struggling to stay afloat. There had always been something aggressive in their relationship to their customers—the service was surly, and the menus bore a sarcastic warning that if you wanted to complain about how long it took your food to arrive, the Golden Arches were just a mile and a half up Route 7. But the arguably charming timelessness of the place had started to look more like decay. Coffee cups and saucers with chips in them were still in service, and broken ones weren’t replaced. The thin curtains were fading from white to yellow. Daisy’s daughter Chase moved even more reluctantly, and they seemed to view the mostly empty tables and chairs more with relief than as cause for alarm. As for Horace, half-visible through the serving window into the kitchen, even the loyal regulars like Mark could only guess whether and how time was having its way with him too.

  One winter night the heat failed and the pipes froze and repairs kept them closed for two weeks. The construction triggered a visit from the state health department, and while Daisy asked for and received a grace period that kept her from having to close again, the upshot was that they would need to replace both their deep fryer and their grill. In March a For Sale sign appeared, hammered into the hard ground by the Route 4 entrance to the parking lot. None of the regulars, Mark included, said a word to Chase about it. It seemed unlikely that she’d get an offer. To put a sign up at all, on a road traveled lightly and mostly by locals, seemed hopeless. It really was, or over the decades had become, a terrible spot for a restaurant.

  Then one day in April the sign was gone. Mark found himself locking eyes interrogatively with the four other local workingmen silently eating breakfast, but no one said anything. Chase came to Mark’s table and refilled his coffee without a word. He sipped it and looked out the window, at the thin threads and buttons of green pushing through the mud in the lot across the road, maybe part of the land trust since it had sat there untouched for as long as he could remember. Ten minutes later his egg sandwich arrived. He tried discreetly to search Chase’s face but he could detect no change in it. When he was paying at the register, his coat already on, he had a moment where he thought, This is ridiculous, and he said out loud, “I see the For Sale sign’s down.”

  “Yep,” Chase said.

  “How come?”

  “I guess because we’re not for sale anymore.”

  “Well, yeah, I—” People did that around there, it was an old Yankee thing, they played word games with you to make you feel dumb when they knew there was something you wanted from them. His father was a master at it. “Did you find a buyer, Chase?”

  “Nope. Five eighteen’s your change.”

  “Five eigh
teen is always my change. Jesus. You can keep it if you’ll just tell me what’s happened.”

  Finally she looked up at him and sighed. He could see the relief in her, even though she was trying to hide it. “It was your friend there,” she said. “Your rich friend. The Benevolent Billionaire.”

  “Hadi? He bought the place?”

  “Nope. He just gave us some money.”

  Mark was aware, without looking, of the others seated behind him who had stopped chewing in an effort to overhear them.

  “Gave it to you?”

  She didn’t feel the need to confirm something she’d already said.

  “What,” Mark said, “like a grant?”

  Chase laughed. “If you like,” she said. “He just said that we were important to the town and he wanted to do what he could to keep us going.” Mark could hear a bit of pride in her voice; it was clear she was quoting him directly.

  “I won’t ask how much,” he said, pocketing his change, “though I’m curious.”

  “Not enough for him to miss,” Daisy said.

  Mark couldn’t really absorb it until he was back in the car heading home. He wondered if great wealth allowed your more generous nature to emerge, or whether it was possessing that nature in the first place—that magnanimous understanding of the common good—that led one to wealth. The house was empty, as it always was at that hour on a weekday. The emptiness and the silence made him contemplative, and at some point that morning it dawned on him that maybe Hadi had nostalgic feelings for Daisy’s for a more sentimental reason: it was where the two of them had met, where the first arrangements were made for the work on Hadi’s house that made it possible for him to become a local, a full-time citizen of Howland and ultimately its leader. Not that their friendship was that important to Hadi—Mark didn’t deceive himself to that degree—but it had been a signal moment in both their lives, for sure, and it had happened right there.