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State of Redemption

By Richard McKeown

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Gusts of cold air chilled Matt Matheny every time a patron came in or went out of Checkers. He needed his parka after all. Sitting alone and looking out the diner’s wide window, Matt read the digital clock and thermometer on the Vermont Bank & Trust building across Main.

33° / 9:43

Matt was skeptical. Back in South Carolina, such thermometers exaggerated temps by five to ten degrees. Matt assumed the same was true in Milford judging by the chill he could not shake. Exaggerated or not, he needed his parka.

Puffy white clouds were rising beyond the bank building. Vermont was in the middle of its sugaring season when sap from maple trees is boiled into sweet syrup. The process that begins in late February and continues into April fills the crisp air with a distinct sweet-smelling aroma. It signals that winter's end is approaching and spring will arrive after all. Maybe not on the calendar’s schedule, but within weeks thereafter. Some years three to four weeks. Other years, six or seven.

Matt felt old. He didn’t recall being so mesmerized by sweet - smelling tree sap as a ten-year-old living just a few blocks away. Then sap, buckets of it, were poured into a large plastic tank fastened to a crude wood wagon he and his friends toted from tree to tree. Fifteen cents a gallon was the going rate for sap paid by a handful of neighborhood syrup makers. Which amounted to a nickel a gallon split among the three boys it would take to haul a full tank. Plus, a gallon of syrup for the boys’ families at the end of the season. Ben Harmon added that perk one year, much to the consternation of his competitors who nonetheless matched it.

The rising wisps of sap steam and their aroma were not the only thing Matt found familiar all these years later. Green Mountain Lanes was still tucked into the south end of the North Main Shopping Center across the way. The Grand Union, then the centerpiece of the line of stores, was now a flea market. And what was Newsome’s Shoes, half of it anyway, now housed a tattoo parlor, a development Matt noted with irritation. The other half was vacant. That the shopping center was still there indicated Milford had changed surprisingly little since his family moved South when he was ten. Things looked smaller now, but familiar.

The Grand Union and Newsome’s Shoes had long since closed, but not Checkers. The place seemed to be in a time warp. Its silver airstream design looked the same now as it had when the pull-behind trailers were in vogue. And still a gravel parking lot. Better traction than pavement in the winter.

On each table next to the napkin dispensers were black and red wooden checkers pieces chipped and faded by age and use. From the looks of them, they could well be the same pieces Matt used when playing a game of checkers with his sister at the tables. Then as now, they were painted black and white in the fashion of checkerboards. Checkers, the game and the diner, had not and would not change much any time soon. Which Matt found gratifying.

Driving around the small railroad town Matt found most old landmarks, Townley Park at the center of town, the train depot, the Courthouse, and aptly named Church Street intact. Matt found the sameness comforting. After the changes he’d been through, sameness was a good thing.

“How ‘bout a warm-up?” “Uh, yes. Sure. Thanks.”

Matt’s nostalgic trip back in time was interrupted by a matronly, plumpish waitress.

“I’ll drink it as long as you keep bringing it, ma’am,” he said. The waitress smiled as she poured.

“‘Ma’am’. Don’t hear that very often,” she said, filling Matt’s mug to a precise half-inch from the top. “Where are you from?”

“Where am I from or where have I been?”

She furrowed her brow, unsure of Matt’s meaning.

“I guess you could say I’m from here. But I’ve been gone a while,” he said. “Why?”

“Not too many people around here that talk like that. Ma’am, I mean,” she said. “With that accent, you must be from Mississippi or Alabama or somewhere down there,” she said.

“South Carolina,” Matt said. “Anderson, South Carolina,” he said, as though a career waitress at a Vermont diner would know, much less care where Anderson, South Carolina was.

“My name is Matt Matheny, by the way,” he said, his hands wrapped around the warm coffee mug.

“My name’s Paulette.”

“I see that,” said Matt with a nod at her nametag. “Do you have a last name?”
“Bouchard. Paulette Bouchard,” she said. Sitting down across from Matt in the nearly empty diner, she kept an eye on its lone remaining customer in addition to Matt. Checkers cleared out by nine most mornings during the week.

“That sounds familiar,” he said. “Bouchard, I mean,” he quickly added, afraid Paulette might think he was being a bit too familiar.

“It should,” Paulette said. “It’s like Smith or Jones up here.”

“I went to grade school with a Peter Bouchard. Over on Franklin Street,” he said. “First, second, third and fourth grades. Reddish hair and Coke bottle glasses.”

“He’s my nephew. Or was,” Paulette said. “Drowned out on the lake about twenty years ago. Ice fishing, the idiot. Drove his car too far out onto the ice too late in the season and it fell in,” Paulette said, pouring herself a cup of coffee. “Ought not slander the dead, I suppose. Especially a relative. But too much beer and too little sense don’t mix well. Not only killed him. Killed my brother-in-law, his father. Shot himself a year to the day later.”

Matt watched as Paulette poured a package of creamer into the other mug on the table and stirred. Her hair had once been reddish, too, he guessed. Now it was mostly gray and pulled up in a bun. Matt correctly guessed she’d worn it the same way thirty years ago. Or longer.

“Wow. That’s...terrible,” he said, somewhat awkwardly. “I’m sorry.”

“Well, you can’t save people from themselves,” Paulette said with a long sigh. “So, what brings you back to this little old outpost?”



Matt’s return to Milford was not so much a step back in time as it was an attempt to restart what had been a good life. Albeit one set adrift and languishing at its midpoint. The sale of Matt’s tech start-up had turned a handsome profit that allowed him and Liz to live comfortably. Extravagance was neither’s style even if a measure of it was affordable. The only extravagance they planned to allow themselves was travel. Which they were making plans to do when they learned Liz was, finally, expecting. Travel was put on hold, then abandoned altogether when their first child was stillborn. Eight months later they learned Liz’s lingering cough was more than an irritation. It was terminal.

Liz’s death was painfully cruel but mercifully quick. Barely four months after their grim sit down with her doctor, Matt received visitors, picked out a casket, selected hymns and listened numbly to a preacher without really hearing a word. People marveled at his strength in the face of such tragic loss. Inspirational they called it. Less charitable souls whispered about his lack of emotion and what it surely meant about his feelings toward his Liz, God rest her soul.

At his sister’s insistence, Matt went to see a psychiatric therapist. Sis had been seeing her for eight years and told Matt, “She’s done wonders for me!” Knowing his sister, Matt wondered about that claim. Yet he went to see the lady out of courtesy to his only sibling more than anything else.

The therapist warned of the sure-to-come post-traumatic-stress- syndrome. Matt promised to call the lady once trauma came calling. Along with a prescription for antidepressants, she gave him a slick business card, the first one he’d ever seen with a photo of its bearer and three cats. He never did fill the prescription. He did tack the business card to the fridge to amuse himself more than anything else. Matt was not one to put much stock in anyone based on a business card, impressive though this one was with a color picture and cats.

Nor had Matt ever put much stock in the therapy profession. His opinion was more than a few therapists had a more compelling business interest in treating than curing. Just once he wanted to hear one say, “It’s time to quit making progress and get better!” It was an opinion Matt kept to himself lest he be accused of insensitivity. And if one wanted a quick trip to social purgatory in the current age, insensitivity was the fastest way to get there.

Matt hoped his return to Milford would help him escape the unpleasantness of the loss of his wife and child. Maybe being back where he started life would help him sort through where he was and where to take it from here. “What you have experienced is tragic, Matt. But it is not an ending unless you let it become one.”

Matt thought the words of the therapist sounded like the old saw, “Today is the first day of the rest of your life.” But the part about “unless you let it become one” stuck with him. If the longevity of his grandparents and parents were any indication, Matt had as many years ahead of him as the forty behind him.

Sight unseen, he leased one of the old houses on Sunset, a steep east-west street in Milford. More than a few homes were over a hundred years old, Matt’s dark brick rental among them. Houses lined both sides of Sunset, shaded by Vermont’s maples tapped for sap in spring and photographed by tourists in fall.

It was while relaxing on the front porch the week he moved in that Matt had the nagging feeling he’d been in the old house before. Its wide porch had a familiar look and feel. The view across the front lawn took him back in time like a vaguely familiar scene, song or scent will. The sidewalk was relatively new, but the large maples were decidedly not. The sidewalk took a slight diversion toward the street to avoid exposed roots of the trees. Matt supposed the same roots had been the demise of the original sidewalk.

Gently rocking in the cool of the evening, Matt caught a glimpse of a bagged, dirty rolled-up newspaper in the bushes. Then it struck him. He had been on this porch before. And on the porch of the house to his left, and the house to his right. Several times. Not in the quiet of the evening, but in the still of the predawn. His house was on a morning paper route he covered for a couple of weeks when he was a boy. Matt had his own route back then but covered this neighborhood a time or two when its regular carrier went on family vacations. Times change, he thought with some melancholy. Back then there was no tossing a rolled up, bagged newspaper from a passing car. It was a time when paperboys walked the neighborhood, bright yellow canvas bags full of newspapers hanging from a shoulder strap. Newspapers went inside porch mailboxes. Or placed inside screen doors. Certainly not tossed on lawns. Or in bushes.

Matt looked over his shoulder to see if his porch still had a mailbox. It did. He noted with relief that Sunset Street was not yet littered with street-side newspaper boxes. Matt’s relief was tempered by the realization there wasn’t much need for paperboys since newspapers themselves were fast becoming extinct. To say nothing of paperboy.


Now, four days after his return to Milford Matt found himself shivering across from Paulette Bouchard. In fifteen minutes, he pretty much told the waitress his life story up to that point.

“And that’s about all there is to me,” Matt said.

“I doubt that,” said Paulette as she slid out of the booth. “And let me warn you about your neighbor across the street. Flo Carpenter. That woman will know everything you do, everything you say, and everywhere you go. She’ll probably know everything you think, too. And she won’t hesitate to let everyone else know everything you do, everything you say, everywhere you go and everything you think,” she warned. “You may not much care, but you need to know. Most people know when someone moves into town. Especially someone with an accent and who is easy on the eyes.”

Matt blushed at Paulette’s observation.

“Thanks for the warning. And for the compliment,” he said. “At least I’ll take it as a compliment.”

“I’m just telling you, so you’ll know,” Paulette said. “You don’t strike me as the sort who burns the candle at both ends. You do strike me as someone who values your privacy.”

“That’s fair. And accurate. And based on just a fifteen-minute conversation,” Matt said. “You ought to be a therapist.”

They both laughed. Standing up, Matt downed what was left in his mug and slipped a twenty-dollar bill under the edge of his saucer.

“I enjoyed the conversation. Very much.”

Paulette’s eyes widened as she looked down at the twenty.

“Our coffee is good but it’s not that good,” she said. “Let me get
your change. At least some change.”

Matt waved her off.

“Hush. Just mark it up as your counseling fee,” he said. “A dollar
a minute sounds reasonable to me. The advice about my neighbor alone is worth more than that,” said Matt.

“Well, I hope. And you let me know if there is anything you need,” said Paulette, before quickly adding “And I mean that in a proper way.”
Matt looked at her and grinned.

“I know you do. I’ll be back. Probably about the same time tomorrow.

“I’ll be here,” said Paulette.

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