Last Updated on August 29, 2026 by Grayson Elwood

The blue ceramic flowerpot by the bottom step had a fresh gray scrape across its glaze. Underneath it sat the heavy brass spare key to the kitchen door, cold and gray with dust.

Juan did not look up from the wooden chair he had clamped to the porch railing. He scraped a dried bead of yellow wood glue from the pine spindle with his pocketknife, the shavings curling onto his heavy leather boots. He had been working on the same leg for twenty minutes, his movements slow and deliberate.

The chair was one of the six my husband had bought from the auction in Seguin back in nineteen seventy-eight, its yellow pine worn dark where our children’s hands had held the backrest.

“Carlos was here Tuesday while you were at the grocery store in town,” Juan said, his gravelly voice barely carrying over the scraping sound.

I touched my silver wedding band, sliding it back and forth against my knuckle. The metal was worn smooth after forty years, thin enough to feel the pulse underneath.

“He did not tell me he was coming,” I said.

“He did not stay long enough to knock,” Juan said. He wiped his blade on a blue bandana, then tucked the cloth into his back pocket. “Just walked up to the porch and went back to his car.”

“He was probably just checking on the roof after the wind last week,” I said.

Juan picked up a small wooden peg from his toolbox. He aligned it with the pre-drilled hole in the chair leg, his hand steady. “He did not look at the roof, Benita.”

“What did he look at, then?”

Juan did not answer right away. He tapped the wooden peg twice with the wooden mallet, the sound flat and heavy in the warm afternoon air. “He stood by the gate for five minutes, looking down the county road.”

“The gate has been there since his father put it in,” I said.

“He might have been looking at the creek bed,” I said. “The runoff has been high since the spring rains.”