Travelers

Grace slowed to a stop and parked alongside the filthy, gray snowbank. Murray Street had been plowed, salted, and sanded, but Mr. Marino’s steep driveway remained shiny-black after last night’s refreeze. She slid open her van door, and bending her knees the way her doctor had advised, she dragged the white, plastic bag of salt on the van floor closer to her. After last year’s fall, Grace kept salt in her vehicle. She scooped the salt with a battered metal measuring cup and tossed it up the slope of the driveway, then scattered more on the sidewalk. She got back in her van, dialed up the heat, and waited for her salt to melt the ice or at least to provide a bit of traction for her climb up Mr. Marino’s driveway because climb it she would, despite the weather and its complications. He counted on her weekly visit, not just for her housekeeping and careful attention to his laundry but for her company as well.

The clock on her dashboard read 7 a.m., and the temperature was only eight degrees. In the dim light Grace could see that Mr. Marino’s inside lights had not yet been switched on. His nurse, or rather nursing assistant, should have been there by now, but no, of course she wasn’t. It didn’t matter which one the agency sent, they were all late and disrespectful, every last one of them. No one came or went into the homes on Murray Street this early in the morning anymore. The old homes with front stoops where neighbors used to talk had been quietly pirated and turned into housing for college students. Greedy landlords rented rooms to too many kids who smoked and drank all hours of all days, Sundays even. No one checked on Mr. Marino, not one of them, not once.

Grace eyed the slow-moving Buick as it rolled down Murray Street, the driver lobbing the occasional Times Union in the vague vicinity of a front stoop. Not many people on Mr. Marino’s street subscribed to the local paper, and that was a shame because keeping up with the goings-on in the community was important. She lifted her hand in a wave as the Buick driver passed, but he did not return her greeting.

She wondered what had happened to paperboys. Mr. Marino’s sons, at least two of them, had been paperboys. They’d pedaled their bikes, their skinny legs and bony knees in constant motion, their scrawny arms hurling the paper—it had been bigger then and called the Albany Times—and hitting their mark: the front stoop above its top step, each and every time. They were good boys, except for the one who got into the wrong crowd, running drugs up from the city. He landed himself in jail and ended up dead under suspicious circumstances. But she didn’t repeat that story out of respect for Mr. Marino and because one never knew who was listening.

Her clock read 7:12 a.m., and if she left her car now and her salt had done its job, she would be inside Mr. Marino’s front hall at 7:15. Grace locked the van’s door for obvious reasons. When the weather turned she’d called Mr. Marino’s daughter-in-law, the one married to the oldest, Jonathon. Jonathon’s wife agreed—reluctantly—to allow Grace to leave her cleaning supplies in the spare bedroom closet, which was empty, completely empty, and Grace knew that woman couldn’t come up with a single reason to deny her, especially after her fall last February. Grace had been prepared to remind Jonathon’s wife that she’d kept house for Mr. Marino long before that woman was in the picture and that she’d brought Sunday dinner to him and his sons for months after Mrs. Marino passed. But it hadn’t come to that. So Grace didn’t have a thing to carry into Mr. Marino’s house except, of course, her pocketbook and her stack of freshly washed cleaning rags. She took those home with her after every visit and bleached them.

Her boots held firm on the sidewalk, and at the base of Mr. Marino’s driveway, she turned her body sideways and inched herself up the slope. Her left foot slid a bit, and she reached for the frozen snow piled high on either side of the asphalt. Grace dug her gloved fingers in and regained her footing. She said a brief prayer to St. Christopher, who was known to protect travelers, and this journey up Mr. Marino’s slippery, sheer driveway certainly merited the saint’s intervention.

Grace was nearly to her employer’s front stoop and began to worry that she was late, a minute or two past her always prompt 7:15 arrival time. She worried that Mr. Marino would fear she’d had an accident. He might pace the floor of his bedroom, though he’d been instructed to wait until one of the ever-tardy nursing assistants arrived to help him. Grace performed that task many times, and she would do it again today, she was sure. She was thinking about helping Mr. Marino with his walker, wrapping his plaid, flannel robe around his narrow shoulders, when her left foot began to slide again.

Grace lunged for the snowbank, but her gloved fingers only brushed the ice, and the downward motion of her hands threw her weight forward. Her foot skated out from under her. She hinged at the hips, and her face hit the hard snowbank, then scraped along the base of it until her head thudded against the driveway. Grace reached out, trying to catch hold of anything to slow her quickening skid down Mr. Marino’s driveway. There was nothing to catch, though. She left a trail of cleaning rags behind her and then smashed, hip first, into the frozen curb. She heard and felt the stomach-churning crunch that forced her eyes closed.

After some time she heard a man’s voice growing closer and closer, shouting and cursing, and there was no need for such language this early in the morning. When she opened her eyes, a long-haired man with metal sticking out of his nose and eyebrow peered down at her.

“I called 911.” He leaned in close. “Don’t try to move. My roommate’s getting you a blanket. Just hold still.”

“Can you tell Mr. Marino? Can you tell him I’ll be a few minutes late?”

He had a kind smile, the young man with the long hair and metal stuck through his face, and tattoos scrolled across the hand that patted her shoulder. Grace didn’t appreciate the pat but kept her thoughts to herself. He turned to the approaching roommate, another young man but with shorter hair, though an odd color, too black to be black. He draped a musty blanket over her and tucked it around her sides.

The long-haired young man softened his voice and asked Grace, “Is that your husband?” To his black-haired friend he said, “She’s asking about a Mr. Marino?”

“That’s the old guy who died last week. Didn’t you hear? He lived alone, right here, and his nurse found him.” The black-haired man gestured up the steep driveway toward Mr. Marino’s house. His hand shaded Grace’s eyes from the sudden bright sun for just that brief moment. Both men gazed down at her, the sun behind them shadowed their faces, and she heard a siren in the distance.

“Mr. Marino couldn’t possibly have died,” she meant to say to them, but for some reason her mouth wouldn’t form the words. She tried to reach out and pat their forearms but nothing happened. She needed them to know, “Someone surely would have told me,” but could not speak. Grace closed her eyes. The two young men—perhaps students from a nearby house on Murray Street—spoke to each other as if she wasn’t there. She listened to the siren’s wail; it was close now, it would be here any minute.

THE END