In November the gutter on the south side of the house pulled away from the fascia in a heavy rain, and Elaine went out in a coat with His and a step ladder and put it back. It took two hours. She used His to lever the sodden leaves out of the bend at the corner, and to bend the strap back into shape where it had rusted half through, and to score a line in the new strap where the screw needed to go. She did not own a scoring tool. She had stopped buying tools she didn't have. His did most things, when it was asked.
When she came down off the ladder her grandson Adam was standing in the driveway with the suitcase he was supposed to have unpacked an hour ago.
"What's that?" he said.
"Gutter."
"No, in your hand."
"Oh. His."
"Whose?"
"That's what I call it."
Adam was nineteen and home from his first year at university and full of the kind of polite curiosity that had not yet learned to ration itself. "But what is it?"
"Nobody knows."
"How can nobody know?"
"Grandpa made it. He didn't tell anybody what for."
Adam took it from her and turned it in his hands the way she had turned it for three days back in February. The wood, dark on one side where Marvin's hand had sat, dark in a fainter band above where her thumb pressed, had a third faint shadow now where the heel of her palm came to rest when she leaned her weight on it.
"It's heavy."
"Yes."
"What do you use it for?"
"Whatever I have."
He set it back in her hand, the way he had set down a robin's egg the summer he was four, the summer he had learned that some things didn't survive being held wrong. He had not been a careful boy by nature; his mother had taught him, with a great deal of patience, to be careful when carefulness was warranted.
"That's a weird thing to call a tool, Grandma."
"I know."
"It's like calling a dog 'My Husband.'"
She laughed. She had not laughed at anything Adam had said for a long time, not because he wasn't funny but because she had not been laughing.
"It's not the same," she said.
"Why not?"
She thought about it. "A dog has its own name. It comes when you call it. It does what it does because it wants to. This —" she lifted His, slightly, "— this doesn't do anything. I do things with it. If I called it Wally or Carl that wouldn't be true. I'd be making up a person who isn't there."
"But His isn't a person either."
"No. It's a relation."
He looked at her. He was nineteen. There was a great deal about her he had not yet noticed.
"Come help me with this last bit," she said, because she did not want him to look at her that way for any longer.
When the gutter was back on its hangers and the strap was tight he went inside to wash his hands, and she stayed at the bottom of the ladder for a moment, looking at the tool. It had cooled in her grip; the brass had taken on the temperature of the November afternoon. The blade was scratched in a new place.
She had not thought of Marvin once during the work. She thought of him now, and felt the absence the way she felt the absence of a tooth she had lost as a girl — a smooth place where there should have been a thing, but a smooth place she had grown around. Not the open socket of February. A different shape.
She put the tool in the kitchen drawer, with the corkscrew and the pizza wheel.