We sit at the same drum

Two hundred and six thousand on my truck and she'll still turn over at twenty below, long as you shut the radio off before you crank her. She's my partner. Her and the dog, and the dog's got better teeth than I do.

I do inspections for the housing authority. Two hundred and twelve units, and I've been inside every one of them more than once and a few of them more than I wanted to be. Smoke detectors and furnace filters, mostly. And whether the back door locks or somebody's been shouldering it shut since Christmas.

The one-stories I do from the chair. Anything with a stairway I put the leg on, and I know which ones have stairs without looking it up. Right one's been gone since '19. Sugar. They took the foot in September and came back for the rest of it in October.

My mom's out on Fire Lane 4. I do her oil and her taxes. She's had me looking for a mouse in her wall since March. We fight about the driveway, because she's seventy-nine and she'll go out there with the shovel just to make a point at me.

Denise retired in June and they put the director job up on the board by the post office. I put in for it. There's four people who decide.

To get to the rest of it I've got to tell you who people are. Roberta Doud is on that board. She's not my blood, exactly. My dad's uncle Bing married a Doud out of Mole Lake, and everybody's been calling them cousins so long that saying otherwise in front of Roberta would get you looked at.

Her older sister was Vergie. Vergie raised four of her own and then raised two of her daughter's, and one of those is the girl who runs the front desk at the clinic now.

Sonny Valliere's mother was a Doud too, a different one, off Vergie's husband's side, so Sonny and Roberta are cousins one way and in-laws another way, and Sonny and me are cousins through Bing if you go back far enough, which around here everybody does. Everybody at that drum is somebody's cousin.

Sonny still can't back a trailer. Fifty-two years old and he'll get out and walk around and look at it like the trailer's the one with the problem.

Him and me started the same summer. We were seven, and the first couple years we sat behind the men and weren't allowed to touch anything. His grandpa was the one who ran it then. Mine hauled pulp and couldn't sing.

He's on my right. Twenty-some years now. One time a kid from Bad River took his chair and Sonny just stood there holding his stick until the kid worked it out on his own.

About eight years, when we're done, I go over to his place. He's out past the end of the blacktop. He'll make eggs at two in the morning like that's a normal thing for a person to do.

First time was the night of Bernard's funeral and neither one of us had been drinking. We went to bed and in the morning he ran me back out to my truck. That's the whole of it.

Vergie went in February. Four nights at the community center and we sang all four. They had the big roaster going with sloppy joes and the coffee out of the urn. The space heater they set by us was pointed at my back and doing nothing for anybody else.

Third night the socket had me raw. Bad winter for that, I drop weight and the fit goes to hell. Got to his kitchen around one, took the leg off and stood it up by the stove, and I left about five in the chair, out the back where his ramp is. Never thought about it again till the next afternoon, under a crawlspace on Old Indian Village looking at a sewer line somebody had fixed with a bicycle inner tube.

Next night Sonny comes in the side door of the community center carrying my leg. Not in a bag. Holding it by the calf with the sock still on it.

Roberta asked was I up to two now. Somebody slid a chair over so Sonny could stand it against the wall.

Then we sang. He got in my truck after and didn't say anything for a long time. Somewhere past the landing he said the plow guy took out his culvert again, second year running, and I said he ought to put a stake in it, and he said he did put a stake in it.

They did the interviews the second week of March, in the conference room, with cookies from the IGA nobody touched. They read the questions off a paper. Every one of them has known me since I was in diapers and they still read them off the paper, which I appreciated more than I thought I would.

There was one about the capital fund I only half answered. I'm not going to sit there and act like I know a spreadsheet I've never had in front of me. What I did tell them is there's forty-one names on the ramp list and two of them have been waiting since 2021, and one of those two is Bennett's own auntie, and Bennett's sitting right there at the table.

At the end Roberta said I'd be all right at this because people let me in the house. She looked at me a second and then read the next one off the paper.

They said two weeks. It's been five. Cheryl's mother-in-law had her hip done, so there's your two weeks. There's another wake Thursday week.

I was out at my mom's Thursday and changed her filter. She's got a stack of the old ones in the furnace room going back to before my dad died, and he used to write the date on the cardboard edge in pencil, so I do it too. Four eighteen.

Saturday I'm moving her chest freezer down to the basement, and I can't do stairs carrying anything, so Sonny's coming. She asked me Thursday was he coming and I said yeah, and she said tell him bring the dog, she likes that dog better than she likes most people.