The Hobby

Chapter OneDay One

Walt Brubaker woke at 5:30 on the first morning of his retirement because nobody had told his body.

He lay still and looked at the ceiling. There was a water stain over the closet shaped like Ohio. It had been shaped like Ohio for eleven years. Every spring he wrote "ceiling stain" on a list, and every spring the list got pushed aside by the tax season, and every May he looked up at Ohio and thought, next year.

Well. It was next year.

Grace slept beside him with one arm thrown over her eyes, which was how she had slept through thirty years of teaching first and second grade. She said it blocked out the light. Walt suspected it blocked out him.

He got up without waking her, showered, shaved, and put on a white shirt and the navy tie with the little yellow ducks that Kyle had given him for Father's Day when Kyle was nine. He was halfway through the knot when he remembered there was nowhere to wear it.

He finished the knot anyway. A man didn't leave a tie half tied.

Downstairs the house was so quiet he could hear the rooster clock over the stove. Grace's mother had bought it at a Kutztown flea market in 1974, and it had been four minutes fast ever since, and nobody had fixed it because Grace's mother had liked it four minutes fast. Walt set his watch by it out of respect and then subtracted four minutes in his head, every time, for thirty eight years.

He made coffee. He drank the coffee. He read the paper, all of it, including the obituaries, which he read the way some men read the box scores. Three this morning. None of them clients. One was a former client, a man named Norman Fegley, who had once tried to claim his bass boat as a home office. Walt had disallowed the boat. Fegley had never forgiven him. Walt felt a small, unworthy satisfaction and then felt bad about it and folded the paper back into thirds.

It was 6:22.

He checked the clock again to be sure. It was 6:26 by the rooster, which meant 6:22.

On a normal Saturday in June he would have been at the office by now, because the practice had kept Saturday hours since the day it opened. He'd have the lights on and the coffee on and the first folder open, the one with the yellow tab, because yellow tabs were the ones that needed something by Friday. Forty one years of mornings like that. Forty one years of knowing exactly what the next thing was.

There was no next thing.

He opened the cabinet beside the stove to get the cinnamon for his toast, and that was where the trouble started.

The cinnamon was not where cinnamon goes. It was between the oregano and a jar of something unlabeled and green. Behind them were three jars of paprika. Walt took down all three. One said it was best by June of 2019. One said March of 2014. The third was so old the label had gone the color of weak tea and there was no date at all, just a price sticker from the Weis Market that said 89 cents.

Walt stood there holding the paprika.

Then he took down everything else.

By seven fifteen the spices covered the kitchen table in rows. He had alphabetized them first, allspice through turmeric, and then he had seen the problem with that, which was that alphabetical order told you nothing about what was going bad, so he had sorted each letter by expiration date, oldest on the left. He kept a tally on a yellow legal pad. Cumin, two jars, one expired. Nutmeg, one jar, whole, fine. Bay leaves, one jar, dated 2008, which he set aside because he wasn't sure bay leaves could expire and he wanted to look it up.

The expired jars went in a cardboard box by the back door. He tore a strip off a sticky note and wrote WRITTEN OFF on it in block capitals and stuck it to the box.

It was the best hour he'd had in a week.

From there it was a short walk to the refrigerator. There were seven containers of leftovers in the refrigerator and not one of them was labeled. Walt considered this a material weakness. He found the masking tape and a black marker and went to work. HAM LOAF, SUNDAY, APPROX 1 SERVING. MASHED POTATOES, SUNDAY? CHECK WITH GRACE. CHOW CHOW, OPENED DATE UNKNOWN. A plastic tub of something brown he couldn't identify even after smelling it, so he labeled it QUESTIONED and moved it to the back.

Then the garage, because the garage was right there.

At 8:40 he was standing in front of the pegboard with every tool they owned spread on the concrete, tracing around each one in marker so that a person would know exactly where the hammer went, and the two hammers, and the screwdriver set that was missing the medium Phillips. He wrote MEDIUM PHILLIPS (MISSING) inside its outline so the absence would be on the record.

He was in the middle of Grace's garden trowels when he found the shoebox.

It sat on the shelf above the paint cans, and it was full of grocery receipts. Months of them. Grace kept them, she said, in case something needed to go back. Nothing ever went back. Walt carried the shoebox into the kitchen, cleared a space among the spices, and started sorting by store.

At 10:31 Grace came downstairs.

She stopped in the kitchen doorway in her blue robe and her reading glasses pushed up into her gray hair. She looked at the table. She looked at the spices. She looked at the box by the back door with WRITTEN OFF on it. She looked at Walt in his tie.

"What," she said, "are we doing."

Walt knew that "we." He had heard it at parent teacher nights. It was the "we" Grace used when a seven year old was standing next to a broken fish tank.

"I'm getting organized," he said.

"You're wearing a tie."

"I was cold."

"It's June."

She came to the table. She picked up the old paprika, the 89 cent one, and turned it in her fingers.

"That was my mother's," she said.

"It doesn't have a date on it, hon. It might be older than Kyle."

"My mother bought that paprika."

"Your mother," Walt said gently, "passed in 2009."

"So did the paprika." She set it back on the table, on the right side, with the keepers. Walt let it go. He was a lot of things, but he wasn't a fool.

She opened the refrigerator for the half and half and stood there with the door open, reading. HAM LOAF. QUESTIONED. She shut the door without the half and half.

"Grace," Walt said. "Sit down a minute. I want to show you something."

He shouldn't have. He knew it while he was doing it. He did it anyway, the way he had once told a client his deductions were fiction while the client's wife was sitting right there.

He turned the legal pad around so she could read it.

"Since March," he said, "you've been buying eggs at the Giant for $4.29 a dozen. The Weis has had them at $3.89 the entire time. I checked the circulars. That's forty cents a dozen. We go through about a dozen and a half a week. Over sixteen weeks..."

"Walter."

"It's nine dollars and sixty cents. I can show you the arithmetic."

"Walter. Put the pen down."

He put the pen down.

Grace sat across from him. She took her reading glasses out of her hair, folded them, and set them on the table. She folded her hands on top of them. She looked at him over her folded hands for a long, quiet moment, and Walt felt himself shrink in his chair until he was about four feet tall with a cowlick.

"Eyes up here," she said.

His eyes were already up there. He made them more up there.

"I love you," Grace said. "I have loved you since the Kutztown Folk Festival in 1983, when you finally worked up the nerve to ask me somewhere, after six years of sitting two pews behind me, and you bought me a lemonade and asked the boy to show you the receipt. I love you very much. I am glad you're home."

"Thank you."

"You need a hobby," she said. "And the hobby can't be me."

"I have hobbies."

"Name one."

Walt opened his mouth. He closed it. He thought hard.

"The taxes," he said.

"That was your job."

"I enjoyed it."

"That," Grace said, "is the problem."

She got up and went to the drawer by the telephone, the one that wouldn't close all the way because it was full of rubber bands and twist ties and three decades of things that might be useful. She dug around in the back. She came out with a sheet of gold star stickers, the shiny kind, half used, left over from her last classroom.

She peeled one off and came back around the table and pressed it carefully onto his tie, between two ducks.

"That's for effort," she said. "You tried very hard this morning. You did a lot of work."

"I did."

"Now I need you to go outside and play."

She took his car keys off the hook. She took his straw hat off the other hook. She put the keys in his hand and the hat on his head, and she turned him by the shoulders toward the front door the way she had turned ten thousand children toward recess.

"Grace."

"Out."

"The garage is only half done. I traced the tools. Where are you going to put the trowels if..."

"I will figure out the trowels." She opened the door. The day came in, warm and green and smelling of cut hay from the Yoder farm across the road. "Go. Be back for supper. Supper is at six."

"What do I do until six?"

"That," she said, "is what a hobby is for."

The door shut behind him.

Walt stood on the front porch in his white shirt and his duck tie and his straw hat and his gold star. He checked his watch. It was 10:41.

He had been retired for one day. Technically less, since the retirement party had ended at nine o'clock the night before, in the social hall of the Vera Crus Volunteer Fire Company, with a sheet cake decorated like a 1040 form and a speech by Tanner Ruth, the young man who had bought his practice, who had pronounced his name Bru Backer twice and then apologized and pronounced it Bru Backer again. Kyle had sent a video from Hawaii. The fire company had played it on the big television, and it had come out sideways, and everyone had tilted their heads to watch Kyle say "Love you, Dad, congratulations on being old" on a beach, sideways, with a surfboard. Loretta Moyer had brought three pies. Dale Kunkle, the new fire company treasurer, had shaken Walt's hand at length when Walt gave him the binder with thirty years of the company's books in it, and had said, "I'll take good care of it, Walt," in the voice of a man accepting a folded flag.

That was last night. This was today. Today stretched out in front of him like an empty column with no figures in it.

Across the road, the Yoders' corn was up past his knees, in long straight rows that ran all the way back to the tree line.

Walt counted the rows.

He got to forty one before he made himself stop.