The first time I saw Heather Stockwell was at my kitchen door on a cool Saturday morning in October. She stood, not quite five feet, just inches from the backdoor screen and greeted me with hands in pockets and Marlboro between her lips. She spoke as though she'd forgotten about the cigarette and I watched it dance as words and smoke came from her mouth.
"I'm here about the job," she said. Her eyes met mine with a firmness that made me feel as though she was more informed than I.
"Job." I was confused.
"Ad in the paper said you needed a handy man. Odd jobs. Electric, carpentry, some glasswork."
She wore jeans and a sweatshirt and I could see that her boots looked as though they'd seen some hard work. Her hair was cut short and was the same color as the filter of her Marlboro. She looked to be about twenty-one or so. I noticed the ash on the tip of her cigarette fall to my porch and I remembered my wife saying she'd run an ad for someone to come in and take care of all those things that I'd been planning to "get to" for years.
"Oh," I said, "My wife ran the ad. She's still upstairs in bed."
Still. I looked at my watch. It was 6:30 and of course Judy was in bed. I was the one who cherished the solace of early morning and lingered with the New York Times over my coffee in our big kitchen. It was a peaceful time of day that belonged to me.
"You'll want to wake her, then?" The girl hadn't moved at all nor had she introduced herself. So I made a quick decision.
"Would you care to come in?" I asked without touching the door. I was feeling guilt over my discomfort. She was, after all, such a tiny young woman.
"That'd be fine." She took hold of the screen door herself with one hand and with the other hand flicked her burning Marlboro out into my yard. "My name is Heather Stockwell."
She accepted the coffee I offered as well as the seat at the kitchen table. I thought about waking Judy, but realized that this was an unusual situation and wondered what had possessed Judy to put our address in the local paper. We live in a small Maine town about forty miles from the coast and though everyone in the town knew who we were and where we lived, the town was prone to drifters, those passing through, particularly after apple season, as they made their way back south.
"Tell me, Heather Stockwell, do you have a copy of the ad?" I sat down across the table from her and slid the half-pint carton of cream across the table for her coffee.
"I take it black, thank you." She was handing me a section of newspaper as she picked up and sipped from the mug of coffee. Her face remained unchanged by the hot coffee.
I looked at the ad. She had circled it in blue pen and it said only, "HANDYMAN NEEDED for small farm in Cromden Village. Odd jobs, maintenance and repairs. Fall into Winter. Payment negotiated. Judy. 397-0754"
"How did you find our address?" I asked this as I sipped at my own coffee, my actions intended to cover up my feelings of insecurity. This young woman had managed to find us and I almost felt stalked.
"Reverse directory." She placed her cup squarely on the table and then looked around the kitchen. "What sort of work do you want done? I can get started right away. Got my tools in the truck." Her head jerked toward the road where I assumed she had left her truck and her tools.
"Well, my wife ran the ad, so I think maybe you should speak to her." I didn't really know what to say. She was certainly not what E.B. White would have described as a handyman, yet there was something about her demeanor that caused me to believe that she could raise a barn in a single day.
"That's fine. I'll talk to your wife," said Heather. She lifted her mug then and drained it. "Good coffee. Thanks."
I rose from the table and stalled. "I'm pretty sure that one of the things she wanted fixed was that broken step you crossed over to get up onto the back porch. But I bet there's a list and she'll want to talk to you. Let me go upstairs and wake her." I stood behind my chair and thought about leaving Heather Stockwell alone in our kitchen. I didn't know this girl at all, but there was something about her; she was so solid; so self-assured, even with her rough edges and her short hair and cigarettes.
"Yeah?" She said this with one eyebrow up.
"Help yourself to more coffee while I'm gone," I said as I started out of the kitchen. On the way down the hall and up the stairs I thought of what I would say to Judy. This was a bizarre situation. Who, after all, would use reverse phone directory to answer a job ad that listed only a phone number?
Well, Heather Stockwell, for one.
Throughout our brief conversation, Judy was fairly simple with her words. For a woman of sixty-two, she was remarkably spry, but at 6:45 in the morning, she was not a woman who could think quickly. And, because of our guest downstairs, it wasn't likely that she'd have the benefit of coffee this morning.
"Reverse directory?" Judy wasn't the one who used the computer, considering it to be on a par with Pac-Man and all video games. She was not aware that the Internet was the way most people were navigating the world. Judy managed just fine with the yellow pages and the telephone and she wrote long letters by hand to our four children, now spread across the country. I would print the kid's e-mails for her so that she felt as though they'd written back to her. In this way she felt terribly tolerant of my foolishness with the computer.
"It's where you type in a phone number and it gives you the address and full name." I said this at the same time that I heard the sound of a car door slam coming from the front of the house. I walked to the window and watched as Heather Stockwell carried a large black toolbox around the side of the house.
"Judy, you'd better hurry because it looks to me as though she's ready to start work."
By the time Judy had dressed and we were down stairs, Heather's cup had been rinsed, placed in the dishwasher and she was finishing up with the repair to the back step.
"Good as new," she said as she stood on it and bounced up and down just a little bit. "The color will gray to match the others in time. After a year, it'll need to be sealed, but I'd give it a full season."
So it was with this that Heather Stockwell came into our lives. She arrived each morning shortly after I'd risen and long before Judy did. She would complete those things that Judy or I had requested and then she would do odd tasks that she found on her own. At the end of each week she'd figure a sum in her head and we'd pay her in cash, which she preferred, and we found her price to be more than reasonable considering that she spent all day with us. She always arrived in her truck and was often in the same clothing. Only the color of the sweatshirt changed. The outside work was done with a Marlboro in her hand and the inside work was done with the perfume of her cigarette smell filling the house. She was indeed quite handy and there seemed to be no job that intimidated her.
The first week of October brought snow. Heather arrived as always and was working on replacing the rotted two by fours that touched the concrete on the frame of our garage. It was cold that day and I remember thinking that it was odd that Heather didn't have a coat. A little before Judy woke, I took Heather a cup of coffee. Black. I always remember how people take their coffee.
"Do you need a coat, Heather? It's pretty cold out."
"Naw," she said as she tapped a two by four into place and then stood to accept the mug of coffee. "I keep warm just fine. All this moving around, I'd have it off again in no time."
She leaned against my truck and took a sip of the coffee. This sip was slow and careful and she closed her eyes as the steam from the cup rose to her face. For the first time, she seemed to be relaxed with me and I was sorry that I had not brought my own coffee with me.
"Do you mind if I ask you something?" I asked her gently, but with the same forward manner that she had shown us over the past month.
"What's that?" she asked. Her eyes rose to meet mine over the rim of the cup though the cup did not move.
"What is your story? Where are you from?" I began to wish for a cigarette and thought of asking her for one of hers, but I'd quit back when Jimmy Carter was in office and to pick one up now was dangerous. Still, I wished for a prop. "I mean, we know most of the folks in town and one day you just showed up. It's like you don't have a past." I could see in her eyes that she trusted me. Even with her lips on the rim of the mug, her eyes were smiling. She waited a moment, saying nothing at all.
"Or a future," said Heather finally as she put her coffee down on the hood of my truck. She walked to the pile of wood and picked up another two by four. For a moment I thought there were tears in her eyes, but I saw that she was almost smiling, so it couldn't have been tears. She went on, "My story's pretty much the same as everyone else's. I'm getting by. Once I finish up with you folks I'll move on. I aim to make it to Virginia before Christmas."
"What's in Virginia?" I asked as I leaned against the truck and watched her work. I was relieved that what may have been tension had turned out to be nothing more than a measurement of my worth. I was pleased that I measured up.
"My family," said Heather. She placed the new two by four against the old one and with a pry rod began to chip away at the rotting wood that was there. "I would like to be there before the baby comes."
"Baby?" I couldn't take it in at first because she seemed so sexless that the thought of her being pregnant didn't make sense to me. "You're pregnant?"
As she pulled the rotting two by four out she grunted, "Yup."
"Wow," I said. "I have to tell you I'm surprised."
At this she stopped and turned to look at me. "Surprised?" she asked. "Why are you surprised?" I can't say if she was offended or if there was even a trace of chip-on-the-shoulder in her voice. I decided to be honest with her.
"Because you don't seem like the type." I said.
"The type? What type is that?" Now there was a chip on her shoulder.
"The type to have sex at all. You seem so-I dunno, straight to business." I knew I was not being careful enough.
She laughed, though. "Yeah, well, that's exactly what it was."
I waited a minute and she turned back to her work before I asked, "Where's the father?"
"The father?" She lined up the top of the pale yellow fresh wood and as she tapped the bottom into place and toenailed it in. She said, "I imagine he's right where I left him."
Judy is the one who found out that the baby was due in March and that the father was a fifty-year-old paper mill worker from somewhere northwest of Bangor. They'd spent that afternoon in the basement reorganizing shelves for storage. Judy would talk about what she'd need and then hold one end of a board or simply chat while heather created shelving for the boxes that Judy had amassed over the years and that we would someday leave to our four daughters to clean out.
"Fifty," said Judy that night in our bedroom as she unfastened her bra beneath her nightgown. "Can you imagine that?"
"No," I said. "I can't imagine any of it. She seems so down to earth. So capable. Did she tell you anything more?"
"Not a thing," Judy said as she slipped under the covers beside me and patted down the comforter around her body. "Not a thing at all."
Heather Stockwell's last day with us came as quickly as her first. She arrived at her usual time and took a cup of coffee with me in the kitchen just as we'd grown accustomed. Then she said, "It's time I finished up with the electricity in the barn. You got some dangerous wiring out there and a fire could take the building before you had a chance to call anyone." I nodded and filled in three letters on the Times crossword. Heather Stockwell stood up and rinsed her cup out at the sink. "I should be finished up before noon dinner," she said. She'd taken to accepting my offer to join us each day and we chatted, the three of us, about nothing it seemed, but Heather Stockwell had become as comfortable at our table for me as Judy was. It had begun to feel like the old days when our own girls were around. Once we'd learned of Heather's condition we'd begun to keep an eye out for her, making sure she ate well. She'd never let us in on where she was sleeping and taking her evening meals, but we knew that she had a good breakfast and noon meal at our table. The talk was comfortable and we knew what not to say to Heather and somehow she knew not to ask about our own children, whom she'd never heard a thing about during her months with us.
This caught me. "Finished up?"
"Yeah." She leaned against the sink and lighted a Marlboro, the only cigarette she ever smoked in my house. "It's time for me to head on south. I don't intend to be in Maine for Thanksgiving." Her hand moved absently over her belly and she looked at me for a moment in silence. "I have to ask something of you. A favor, I guess."
"What's that?" I said. I let the paper drop to the table. I thought about this young girl and how she'd arrived into our lives like a stray dog and how, just like a stray dog, she'd changed things so much.
"I need to leave something with you in case somebody comes looking for me. It's just a note. I'm not even sure that anyone will come." She took a long haul off her cigarette and then ran it under the faucet of the sink. She tossed the nearly full cigarette across the room and into the pail. Heather Stockwell was not the type of woman who would ever miss. "If no one comes before April, toss it out."
I wanted to so badly, but I didn't ask her. I simply nodded my head. She went outside to the barn and I sat alone with my thoughts. Her departure that afternoon was as fast as her arrival had been. Once she'd left, it felt like we'd lost a daughter to the real world all over again. You spend your life teaching then to fly and when they do, it hurts. But Heather Stockwell was one we hadn't planned on. It almost seemed unfair.
Winter passes slowly in Maine and Judy and I are not part time Yankees who escape to Florida, so we wait it out. Judy busies herself with suet and seed for the birds and I read. I enjoy evenings almost as much as mornings, so an evening that comes early is fine with me. We stay warm by staying in and if a Nor'easter comes in and buries us in snow, we can wait several days for George Deveraux's plow to come by. That particular winter was a tough one. We took more than one hundred inches of snow between November and May and by April even I was getting anxious to see some soil and sun.
By June 12, I noticed that the top step at the back porch was starting to look a little more like the others; that the color of the wood was starting to gray, like everything in Maine does after enough time in the elements. The thought of the step logically made me remember Heather Stockwell and then I remembered my promise to her on that last day. I thought of the thin white envelope she'd left with me before moving on. Virginia, she'd said. That's where she was headed.
Judy was in town at the time, filling up her car with flats of flowers and bags of mulch. I had put the envelope in the copy of "Come Along With Me" and since I was the only one who ever touched the books in the den, it was easy to find.
I sat with it in front of me at the kitchen table. I had promised Heather Stockwell that if no one came for it that I would destroy it. The envelope was very thin, no writing on the outside and I might well have vowed that it was empty. I sat tormented for a while. A man wrestles with his morality from time to time and though he wants to do the right thing, he also wants to do the wrong thing. I had made a promise to Heather Stockwell and though she was just a young pregnant girl who passed through our lives during the fall, I felt that my word was my word.
But who would know? She said that if no one came looking for her that I should throw it away. She didn't specifically tell me not to read it. I went on like this, back and forth inside my head, trying to convince myself that it was an ethical thing I wanted to do.
Judy found me, just as I was, sitting at the kitchen table. The open envelope was in front of me and I was simply staring straight ahead. She tells me now that she called me a dozen times from outside, but I don't remember hearing anything at all. I just remember seeing her pretty face as she picked up the letter from in front of me and read it out loud:
"Daddy, the man who gave you this letter is a good man but he knows nothing. He thinks my name is Heather Stockwell and he thinks I am headed for Virginia. The baby's father doesn't know I'm pregnant and doesn't really know me that well anyway. You won't find me, but to save you time of trying, my baby is due in mid-March and by April first I'll be a different person with a legally different name and far away from you. The baby will be in the home of a stranger with a new name and a better chance at happiness than you ever gave me. Thank this nice man who knows nothing and then turn around and go on home."
Judy was in shock, just as I had been. The letter fell from her hands back onto the table and she sank into one of the chairs. She said nothing. I began to weep. Big wracking sobs took over my body and all I could think of was my own children, spread out over the country, sending e-mails but never visiting. I thought of how easy it would have been to have Heather Stockwell become one of my own kids; how Heather Stockwell really did for a period of about four months when she was running from an empty childhood toward the hope of a real life. I wept for the sacrifice she made for her baby, for herself and maybe I even wept for myself for the ignorance and safety I enjoyed during the summer and autumn of that year when we had the chance to be a mother and father one last time.
