I Overpacked for the Apocalypse, So My Daughter Invited the Street novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Borrowed Things

Floyd phones the railroad and the county about a date and a place, recalls every tool he has lent the street while Garth returns each one improved, and Elspeth accepts a cover story about a Beldon lodge weekend as Garth announces he is on the bus Floyd says does not exist.

"You were up before five," Elspeth said. "Your kitchen light was on."

She held the dish out toward me with both hands.

"Men who are up before five are either in love or in trouble," she said.

"I made a chicken and rice on Sunday," she said. "There was extra."

I did not take it.

I looked at the blue stripe on the lid, and my arms did not seem to belong to me.

Lucy took it for me.

"Thank you, Mrs. Crowl," she said. "Dad is planning a trip."

"I heard. The whole street heard the printer."

"Friday week," said Lucy. "He's taking us up to my grandfather's lodge for the weekend. There are five empty seats in the van."

"It's not a street weekend," I said.

"It's going to be a street weekend," said Lucy.

Elspeth looked at the seating chart in Lucy's other hand.

She is a retired county nurse, and she read the chart from top to bottom in one pass.

"Seven seats," she said. "Who's in three?"

"Nobody," I said. "It's a family trip."

"Then I'd hate to intrude," said Elspeth, who had never in her life hated to intrude.

"You wouldn't be intruding."

My voice did something I hadn't planned.

She looked at me.

"I'd like you to come," I said. "I'd like you to be in seat three."

"Well," said Elspeth. "I'd have to bring something."

"No casseroles. They aren't on the packing list."

"Floyd Beldon, I have fed this street through two floods and a blizzard."

"Perishable and unlabeled," I said. "That's the objection."

"I'll label it."

"She'll label it," said Lucy.

She wrote on my seating chart in pen: Seat 3, Mrs. Crowl, casserole.

I stood on my own sidewalk and was outvoted by a pen.

Then I went back into the house and made two calls from the kitchen phone.

The railroad's customer line put me through to a man who said a derailment report needed a car number and a defect.

I said Harlan yard, Friday the seventeenth, eight tanker cars.

He asked what was wrong with them.

I said I didn't know.

He said he would log it, in the voice of a man logging it.

The county emergency office was kinder.

A woman took my name and asked how I knew, and when I said I couldn't say, she wrote that down as well.

She said she would pass it to the emergency manager, and that a date and a place was not nothing.

I hung up and got my lending ledger.

Birch Street has fourteen houses, and I had spent six years lending tools to eleven of them.

The street sits at five hundred and sixty feet, and the Low would pour down it an hour after dark.

My father's lodge stood above that, on the Knob, the ridge west of town.

You reached it by Quarry Road, past a locked gate, and it had a spring, two woodstoves and twenty beds.

I had always thought of it as ours.

I wanted my generator back, and I wanted my tools.

The first thing I learned in the lodge chair was that I had never owned enough of anything.

The ledger was a spiral notebook with three columns: date lent, date returned, condition.

Two doors down, Garth Vetch was loading a ladder onto his flatbed truck.

He is thirty-seven, a solar installer with a sunburned neck and a pencil stuck in his hair.

In the cab beside him sat a beagle with three legs.

"Garth," I said. "I need my hedge trimmer."

"Oh, good," said Garth. "I've been trying to give it back for a year."

He went into his garage and came out with the trimmer.

The trimmer had a new case.

"That isn't my case," I said.

"Yours cracked. I got you one with a lock."

"The blade is shiny."

"I sharpened it," said Garth. "It was chewing the hedge."

I wrote in the ledger: returned, condition, improved.

I had not planned for that column to exist.

"My extension ladder," I said.

He brought it out.

The feet had new rubber, and a tag was wired to the rail that said Property of G. Beldon. Serviced.

"Garth."

"Your top rung wobbled," said Garth.

"My wet vac."

"That one I did." He rolled out a wet vac with a different hose, a different motor and a sticker of a dog.

"This is not my wet vac," I said.

"It's your wet vac. It's just a better one."

I stood on the curb holding a ledger in which every line now read the same.

I had distrusted Garth Vetch for six years because he borrowed things.

It had never once occurred to me to ask why he was so careful to return them improved.

The beagle watched me through the truck window and did not offer a theory.

"What are you using the van for?" Garth said. "Elspeth said something about a lodge."

"A family trip. Friday week."

"Cool. I'll bring the trailer," said Garth. "It's got a seven-kilowatt generator, a battery bank and four panels. I can run a pump off it."

"I didn't invite you."

"She did. She said I'm on the bus."

"There is no bus," I said.

Behind me, on the sidewalk, my daughter cleared her throat.

She had Elspeth's casserole in one hand and my seating chart in the other.

"There's going to be a bus," said Lucy.

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