Doris was in her chair by the window, watching the street the way she did now — not looking for anything, just watching. The television was on with the sound off.
The mailman came at eleven-fifteen. He’d been coming at eleven-fifteen for nine years, except during the holidays when they put on the substitute, a heavyset woman who sorted as she walked and sometimes skipped houses entirely. Doris had never said anything about the skipping. It wasn’t her mail that got skipped.
A dog crossed the street — the brown one from the corner house, the one with the bad hip that made its back end swing wide on the turns. It stopped at the fire hydrant, considered it, moved on. Doris had watched this dog age. It used to sprint. Now it negotiated.
Her daughter called on Thursdays. It was Tuesday. Her son called on no particular schedule, which meant rarely, which meant when he needed something, which meant money or reassurance, and Doris had learned not to distinguish between the two.
The television showed a woman gesturing at a map. Doris didn’t need the sound to know it was weather. The woman’s hands moved the same way regardless of the forecast — broad sweeps for fronts, small circles for pressure systems, a pointing finger for the local area. The gestures preceded the information. Or maybe the gestures were the information, and the words were just habit.
A car she didn’t recognize pulled into the Hendersons’ driveway. It sat there with the engine running. After two minutes, it backed out and left. Doris noted this without alarm. People made wrong turns. People checked addresses. People sat in driveways working up the courage to go inside, or working up the courage to leave. You couldn’t tell from the outside which one it was. You couldn’t always tell from the inside, either.
She’d been a bookkeeper for thirty-one years. Columns of numbers, each one exactly right or exactly wrong, no room for almost. She’d liked that. The way a ledger balanced or it didn’t. The way an error announced itself — not loudly, but inevitably, because the numbers wouldn’t lie even when the people who produced them tried to.
The brown dog came back the other way. Faster this time. Something had interested it, or frightened it — the gait was the same for both.
Doris shifted in her chair. Her left hip clicked the way it did, the sound so familiar it had stopped being a sound and become just part of moving. The doctor had said she could get it replaced. She’d said she’d think about it, and she had thought about it, the way she thought about the mail and the dog and the car in the driveway — observing the thought, letting it pass.
The television was showing a commercial. A man held a mop as though it had changed his life.
Doris watched the street. The light moved the way it did at this hour — from the east side to the center, a slow traverse she could have timed with a kitchen clock if she’d wanted to, but she didn’t want to. The timing was the timing. It didn’t need a clock to be precise.