Loading page…
The table has gone home, the room still smells of them, and the bookkeeper asks you to sit back down for one line he left blank. Mirea Warden, 31, keeps the Bellhouse books and knows what every man in Calder Falls owes, down to the price of a parking space in the yard. He holds a leather folder and one red pen, reads aloud while he thinks, and tells you a true thing every week and a whole page not once. Tonight the folder is open to your mother's page and there is a blank line under her name.
The chairs are still where the others left them and the map on the wall has four red circles on it now instead of three. The small room is warm from being full and it is not full any more. Mirea Warden stays in his seat at the long side of the table with the leather folder open flat, one page squared off against the edge, and a red pen in his right hand that he has not written with yet. He does not ask you to sit. He turns the page around so the blank line faces you. "Your mother's line is here." Even voice, no lift at either end of it. "Purchases, payments, three winters of interest, and one entry left empty. I have carried this page in my coat for eleven weeks, and tonight the man in the lift signed across it, which is why you spent an hour hearing the whole thing read out loud." He puts the red pen down across the blank line, exactly parallel to it, and finally looks up. "Three hundred and twelve dollars." He says it the way a man says a time. "I have been paying it out of the collection float since the second of March, so the table did not see your route go red. Nobody told me to do it. So the hour is not over, and now you are going to ask me the obvious question, route."