By Clara Langford. A free reader bonus.

A Door That Doesn't Latch

 A Cedar Falls Story

The storm door swung wide before Nell had the key out of the lock, and the wind took it the rest of the way.

She caught it on the backswing. The aluminum was cold enough to bite. She held it against her hip and worked the deadbolt with her free hand, and she thought what she had thought at eleven, and at nineteen, and at forty-three.

Somebody ought to fix that door.

Nobody ever had. Her father had meant to. Her mother had said she liked knowing when the wind changed.

Inside, the house smelled like cold plaster and the ghost of a furnace that had been running at fifty-five degrees since November. Nell set her bag down in the entry. She did not take her coat off. She stood there and let her eyes go around the room the way you do when you have been away eleven years and are counting what survived.

The recliner. The good scissors drawer. The framed photograph of the Buchanan cousins at Priest Lake, 1974, all of them squinting.

Her mother's reading glasses on the arm of the couch, folded, waiting.

Nell picked them up and put them down again in the same place, which was not a decision so much as the absence of one.

She had come to empty the house. That was the entire agenda, written out on the flight in her own handwriting, with the estate lawyer's number at the top and four charities that took furniture. Two weeks of leave. A rental car with Idaho plates. A roll of contractor bags still in the trunk.

She was very good at other people's endings. That was the thing about it.

Nineteen years a hospice chaplain. She could walk into a room in Sacramento where a family had gone silent with fear, and she could make the air in that room usable again inside of ten minutes. She knew what to say to a son who had not visited. She knew when to say nothing at all.

She had not been in the room when her own mother died.

Arlene Buchanan went into Mercy General on a Tuesday in November with her heart failing the way it had been failing for three years. It was the slow stepwise kind that gives everybody plenty of warning and still surprises them. The third admission in fourteen months. Comfort measures by Thursday.

Nell had booked a flight for Saturday, because Saturday was when the coverage worked out, and because her mother had said on the phone that there was no rush. She had used the flat voice she kept for anything important.

Arlene died at four ten on Friday morning.

Nell had been forty minutes into a vigil with somebody else's family at the time. A man named Ray, ninety-one, six daughters. She had held Ray's hand and said the words she says, and her phone had been in a coat pocket in another room, on silent, the way it always was.

She read the record afterward. She knew every line of it. Knowing every line of it had not helped.

Nell went through to the kitchen. The clock over the stove was still running, which meant somebody had changed the battery, and she did not know who. She ran the tap until it lost the rust.

Outside the window the light was going the way it goes in late February, thin and low across the Wendlers' field, and the storm door banged once behind her in the wind.

She let it bang.

***

The automatic door in the ambulance bay had been dragging for a week, and Del Marchetti had told them twice that it was the bottom roller and not the sensor.

He had the panel off at ten forty on a Wednesday night, kneeling on a folded towel because the concrete was concrete. He ran the door by hand and listened to it, which was the thing he did.

There. Right at the end of the travel. A small grinding hesitation, like a man clearing his throat before saying something he did not want to say.

"Bottom roller," he said, to nobody.

"You've been saying that."

Olivia Bennett had come out through the bay with a clipboard against her ribs and her reading glasses pushed up into her hair. Nineteen years Del had been at Mercy General, and Olivia had been here for most of them. They had the shorthand of two people who had worked a lot of bad nights in the same building and never once socialized.

"I have been saying that," Del said.

"Purchasing said the part's eleven dollars."

"Purchasing said that in January."

Olivia made a sound that was not quite a laugh. She looked past him at the empty bay, at the wet apron of asphalt under the lights, and she rolled her shoulders once.

"Quiet?" Del asked.

"For now."

That was as much of a forecast as anybody at Mercy would give you. Ninety-two beds. Two ORs. A helipad that got repainted the year the grant came through and not since. On a good night the whole place ran like a house with people asleep in it, and on a bad one you found out how many of the ninety-two beds were actually usable.

A rig came in at eleven with an older woman off a fall on an icy walk. Del stood back against the brick and out of the way while the medics brought her through his half-fixed door. They gave the handoff at the desk in the flat, fast, unexcited voice of people who do this nine times a shift. Then they went out to clean their cot, and that was the last anybody saw of them.

Del had watched a thousand of those, and it never stopped being the part that impressed him. They carried the whole thing in, they set it down, and they left it with the people whose turn it was now.

Olivia came back through and tapped the clipboard against her leg.

"You hear Arlene Buchanan's daughter is in town?"

Del kept his hands on the door track.

"House on Larkspur," Olivia said. "Rita's had her in twice."

"That right."

"Emptying it, I guess." She was already turning back toward the doors. "Somebody ought to bring her a casserole. This town's slipping."

Then a radio said something and she was gone, and Del stayed where he was with his hand flat against the cold aluminum of a door that would not shut properly.

He knew about the daughter. He had known since November.

He had been in the room.

It had not been anything official. He changed a light ballast in 4B at two in the morning, because two in the morning is when you change a ballast in an occupied room without waking the whole hall. The woman in the bed had been awake. She asked him to leave the overhead off and work by the bathroom light, so he did. And then she asked him, in the same tone a person uses to ask you to hand them the salt, whether he was in a hurry.

He was not in a hurry.

The on-call chaplain covered three counties out of Brighton and was in Brighton that night. The night nurse came in every twenty minutes and did what needed doing and went back out. The oxygen stayed on, not because anybody thought it would change the ending, but because it made the breathing easier to bear.

Del pulled the vinyl chair over to the side of the bed. He sat down in it. He stayed until ten past four.

He had never told anybody. It had not seemed like his to tell.

In nineteen years he had learned exactly one thing about being the maintenance man in a hospital, which was that people say things in front of you they would not say in front of somebody they thought was listening.

He got the panel back on. He carried the towel and the screwdriver back to the shop and hung his keys on the board, and then he stood there a while with his coat half on.

Larkspur was four blocks off Main. He knew the house. Green mailbox, bad storm door, a lilac by the porch that Arlene had complained about every spring for as long as he had been buying his tomatoes at the same stand she did.

He put his coat the rest of the way on. He went home to County Road Eighteen instead, and lay awake a while, and did not decide anything.

***

Rita did not hold booths. Everybody in Cedar Falls knew that Rita did not hold booths, and everybody also knew that the second one on the left had belonged to Dr. Carter on Saturdays for a good while now, which was a different thing entirely and not worth arguing about.

Nell got the fourth booth and a cup of coffee she did not order.

"You look like your mother," Rita said.

"People keep saying that."

"They'll keep on." Rita refilled a cup two tables over without appearing to move. "She sat right there. Wednesdays. Toast and one egg, and she'd read the whole paper including the legal notices."

Nell put both hands around the cup. "I didn't know that."

"No reason you would." Rita said it without any weight on it, and then she was off down the row, and Nell was grateful and had nowhere to put the gratitude.

There was a version of this she had braced for on the plane, the version where a small town closes around you and asks where you have been. It was not happening.

What was happening instead was harder to stand. People kept handing her small pieces of her mother's ordinary life, casually, the way you hand somebody their change.

She walked up Main afterward with her collar up. The hardware store had its lights on. Bobby Kessler was behind the counter in a plaid flannel shirt, exactly where Bobby Kessler had been standing since Nell was in high school, and he had her hinge shim in his hand before she finished describing the problem.

"Storm door," he said.

"Storm door."

"Arlene's never latched." He set the shim on the counter and looked at it. "Nineteen ninety-something, your dad came in about that door. I told him he needed the whole frame square, not a shim."

"He bought the shim."

"He bought the shim," Bobby agreed.

Nell laughed, and then stood there with the laugh still in her mouth and no idea what to do with it. It was the first one in three months. It had come out of nowhere and it had cost her something.

Bobby Kessler, to his credit, rang up the shim and did not look at her.

She was on the porch at four with the shim in her coat pocket and no screwdriver, going through the kitchen drawers for the second time, when a truck slowed on Larkspur and stopped at the curb.

The man who got out was somewhere in his fifties, heavy through the shoulders, grey at the sides. He had a canvas jacket and the kind of walk that does not hurry, because hurrying has never once helped. He stopped at the bottom of the porch steps rather than coming up them.

"Nell Buchanan?"

"Yes."

"Del Marchetti. I work over at Mercy." He glanced past her at the door, and then back. "Bobby said you were after a shim."

"Bobby said that to you."

"Bobby said that to about nine people," Del said. "It's a small store."

She should have found that intrusive. She had lived in a city for eleven years, where nobody arrived at your porch on the strength of a hardware purchase. Instead she stood aside, and he came up, and he ran the storm door open and shut twice while she watched.

"It's not the latch," he said.

"Bobby said the frame's not square."

"Bobby's right. Frame's not square." Del crouched and put two fingers on the lower hinge. "But it's off by about a nickel, and this door's been getting away from your mother for thirty years because of a nickel."

He took a stubby yellow-handled screwdriver out of his jacket pocket. He backed out the bottom screw, worked the shim in behind the hinge plate, and drove the screw home. He stood up. He swung the door shut with one finger.

It latched.

Nell looked at it. She had a strange, unmanageable urge to sit down on the step.

"That's it," she said.

"That's it."

"Thirty years."

"About that." Del put the screwdriver back in his pocket, and then took it out again and set it on the porch rail, which she did not understand and did not ask about. "You'll want to do the top one in a year or so. Same trick."

"I'm selling the house."

"All right," he said.

He did not argue with her about it, and he did not soften it, and he did not say any of the things people had been saying since November about how she would know when she was ready. He stood on her mother's porch with his hands in his jacket pockets and looked at the lilac.

"She used to complain about that lilac," he said.

"Every spring of my life."

"Every spring of mine too." Del turned to go down the steps. "It's a bad lilac."

"It's a terrible lilac."

He stopped on the second step. He had his back mostly to her, and he stood there long enough that she understood he was deciding something.

"Miss Buchanan," he said.

"Nell."

"Nell." He turned around. He looked at her, and then at a point somewhere past her left shoulder. "I'd like to come by again. There's a thing I ought to tell you, and I want to do it right, and not on a step with my truck running."

Nell's hands had gone very still at her sides.

"All right," she said.

He nodded once and went down the walk. The truck pulled away and turned at the corner, and Larkspur went back to being empty, and the storm door stayed shut in its frame like it had never in its life done anything else.

The screwdriver stayed on the rail.

***

He came back Friday with a pie, because his mother had raised him and because a man does not turn up to say a thing like this with empty hands.

Nell had the kitchen half in boxes. She put the pie on the counter and looked at it and said, "You didn't have to," and Del said, "I know," and neither of them made a move toward plates.

"Sit down," she said.

They sat at the table, on the two chairs that had not yet been designated for the church. The clock over the stove ticked. Out the window the light was down to the last of it, that flat blue that comes off snow in a field, and the kitchen was the temperature of a house somebody is not living in.

Del put his hands flat on the table.

"I was in the room when your mother died," he said.

Nell did not move.

"I'm not anybody," he said. "I want that out front. I'm maintenance. I was changing a ballast in 4B at two in the morning and she was awake, and she asked me to leave the big light off and work off the bathroom light, so I did. And then she asked was I in a hurry." He stopped. "I wasn't in a hurry."

"You stayed."

"I stayed."

The refrigerator cycled on behind them, and neither of them looked at it.

"How long," Nell said.

"Two hours or so. Little more."

"And you—" Her voice did the thing where it goes to gravel. She waited it out. "Was she frightened?"

"No." Del said it fast, and then he slowed down, because he had thought about how to say this. "She was tired. She was tired in a way I've seen a couple times, and it isn't the same as frightened. The nurse came in every twenty minutes and did her business and went back out. Marge, I think, or the other one. Your mother watched the door every time it opened."

"She was watching for me."

"She never said that." He looked at her. "I'm not going to tell you what she was doing in her own head. I don't know."

Nell put her hand over her mouth and took it away again.

"What did she talk about?"

"The radiator," Del said.

"The radiator."

"It was knocking. Old building." He turned his hand over on the table. "She said it sounded like somebody moving furniture upstairs, and that her own mother's house on Pike Street had a radiator that did the same thing. She hadn't thought about that house in fifty years."

"That's the Pike Street in Wallace."

"That's what she said." Del nodded slowly. "She talked about Priest Lake. She talked about a dog named Sergeant. And she said you were three states away and doing a good job of it, and she said that twice."

"She said that."

"She said that twice," Del said. "I remember because the second time she was working pretty hard to breathe, and she still spent it on that."

Nell put her head down. Not dramatically. She lowered her forehead onto her own two hands where they were crossed on her mother's kitchen table, and she stayed there.

Del did not reach over. He sat with his hands where they were and let the clock run, and he waited, because waiting is nine-tenths of it and he had learned that in a vinyl chair in room 4B.

After a while she sat up. Her face was wet and she did not do anything about it.

"I do this for a living," she said.

"I know it. Rita told me."

"Nineteen years. I have sat with two hundred people while they died, and I have told every one of their daughters that being there is not the same as loving them." Nell laughed, and it came out wrong. "I believe it. I have never once not believed it. And I have been walking around since November like a woman who has never heard it in her life."

"That sounds about right," Del said.

She looked up.

"Nobody gets to hand themselves the thing they hand everybody else," he said. "I don't know why that is. But I've never seen it work."

Nell wiped her face with the back of her wrist.

"Why didn't you tell anyone?" she asked.

"Wasn't mine." Del shifted in the chair. "People say things in front of me they wouldn't say in front of somebody they thought was listening. That's the whole job, some nights. I've been carrying other people's four in the mornings a long time, and I don't put them down in the break room."

"Then why tell me?"

He thought about it. She watched him think about it, and she understood that he was not stalling.

"Because you're the one it belonged to," he said. "And because you were going to sell this house and go back to California, and never know she spent the last of it on the radiator and Priest Lake and you."

Outside, the wind came up Larkspur and hit the porch, and the storm door did not move at all.

***

She stayed through March.

It was not a decision she made in one sitting, which was how she knew it was a real one. The estate lawyer got a phone call about a delay. The two weeks of leave became four, and then became a conversation with her director in Sacramento that went better than she had any right to expect. She had nineteen years of credit there and had never once asked for anything.

On a Tuesday she walked into Mercy General's lobby, past a volunteer in a red vest and a television playing a weather forecast with no sound, and asked at the desk who she would talk to about per diem chaplain hours.

The woman at the desk said, "Oh, honey," in a tone that meant yes before anybody said yes.

It was not much of a job. Two weeks a month, on call, covering a building that had gone without an on-site chaplain since a Methodist minister in Brighton took on a third county. Nell would keep her hours in Sacramento and fly out for the rest. It was a ridiculous way to arrange a life at fifty-one.

She arranged it anyway.

Olivia Bennett found her on the second afternoon and looked her over once, with an expression that gave away nothing.

"The coffee is terrible and the tea is worse," Olivia said. "Marge is on nights and she'll want to talk to you about her mother. Welcome to Mercy."

The first call came on a Thursday, and it was a family of four in the corridor outside 4B, which Nell had known was going to happen eventually and had not expected in the first week. She stood in the hallway with them and did the work. She asked the questions that let a daughter say the thing out loud instead of carrying it down to the parking lot.

Afterward she sat in the stairwell by herself for six minutes, and then she went back out and finished the shift.

Del was in the ambulance bay on the last Friday of the month with the panel off the automatic door again.

"They send the roller?" Nell asked.

"They sent the roller."

"Eleven dollars."

"Eleven dollars," Del said, "and four months."

She stood with her back against the cold brick and watched him work. He ran the door by hand and listened to it, and whatever he heard this time made him nod. He put the panel back on with a small stubby screwdriver she had seen once on a porch rail, twice since in a coat pocket, and once in the console of a truck.

"I'm keeping the house," she said.

Del did not look up. "I heard."

"Bobby?"

"Rita."

"Of course."

He set the last screw and stood and wiped his hands on his jeans, and then he looked at her properly. There was a question in it that he was not going to ask out loud in an ambulance bay at four in the afternoon.

"Come for dinner," Nell said. "It's a terrible kitchen. Half of it's in boxes."

"I've eaten in worse."

"I know you have."

He walked her out. The parking lot had been patched so many times the asphalt read like something geological, and the light coming across it was doing what it does at the end of the first warm week. Going gold and long, and making the whole tired lot look like it meant something.

At the car she turned around, and he was closer than she had accounted for, and she put her hand on the front of his canvas jacket and kissed him.

It was not a long kiss. It was not a young one either. His hand came up and rested at the back of her neck, and it stayed there a second after she had stopped, which was the part she thought about later.

"Well," Del said.

"Yes," Nell said.

He opened her door for her, which she did not need and did not object to. She drove out of the lot and down Main past the hardware store, where Bobby Kessler waved at her through the window, because Bobby Kessler waves at everybody.

At the house on Larkspur she got out and went up the walk with her keys already in her hand. She opened the storm door. She let it swing shut behind her, and it caught, first time, the way it had caught every time for a month.

Nell stood in the entry with her hand still on the frame.

Then she went into the kitchen and took the yellow-handled screwdriver out of her coat pocket, where it had been all afternoon. She opened the drawer where her mother had kept the good scissors, and she put it in there.

She did not tell him she had it. He never asked for it back.

The lilac was going to be terrible again in a month. She was going to be here to see it.

***

Cedar Falls and Mercy General are also the setting of the Mercy General Series, beginning with Second Chance at Mercy General.