What the Stones Keep



Trudy Williams was standing at Register 3 in the Walmart on Eight Mile Road when she realized she had forgotten to take her pills. She had left them on the bathroom counter, next to the toothbrush she had not used in three days because the pharmacy had only given her a fifteen-day supply and the refill was not due for six more.



She stood at Register 3 and forgot about the pills for forty-seven minutes, which was how long her shift lasted before the lunch replacement showed up—a kid named Devon, nineteen, with a nose ring and the expression of someone who had already decided that this job was beneath him, which was rich, coming from someone who made eight-fifty an hour.



"Rough day?" Devon said, as he punched in.



"Rough week," Trudy said. She rang up the first customer—a woman buying cat food and a frozen pie—and thought about the pills on the bathroom counter. She did not feel urgency. Urgency was for people whose lives were moving in a direction she could not follow.



---



Mike Brennan pulled into the rest stop off I-75 near Pontiac at 11:30 p.m. He had been driving for nine hours, picking up a load of auto parts in Cleveland and delivering them to a warehouse in Flint. The load was heavy, which meant his suspension was bottoming out on every bump, which meant his back was going to kill him in the morning, which meant he would take ibuprofen and then take more ibuprofen and then stop taking ibuprofen because the bottle was empty and he would go without until someone ordered him a new one.



He had not heard from his dispatcher about a return load. That meant either he was on standby—which cost nothing, his pay being hourly only when he was moving—or he was being phased out, which also cost nothing except to him. Mike had been phased out before. It was a process that did not involve conversation. It involved a phone call that said your routes have been reassigned, followed by a cardboard box from human resources containing a pen and a stress ball.



He went into the rest stop diner, ordered a coffee, and sat at the counter. The coffee was hot and bitter and tasted of the pot, which had not been cleaned since the last driver who looked like he might file a complaint.



He thought about Trudy. He had not seen her in four days. She lived in a apartment off 8 Mile that he had never visited during the day because he knew from experience that daytime showed things that nighttime concealed. He had been there twice at night—once in October, once in November—and each time he had stayed for maybe two hours before getting in his truck and driving back to the I-75 corridor.



They did not do dates. They did not do dinners or movies or any of the things other people did. They did sitting in her apartment with the television on, drinking beer from bottles, occasionally touching. It was not romantic. It was not unromantic. It was what it was, and what it was was two people who had been abandoned by their respective lives finding a temporary arrangement that involved less loneliness than being alone.



Trudy told him once that she used to work at a car plant. She said it in the third person, as if she were describing someone else: She worked at a car plant for twelve years. Then it closed. Then she went to Walmart.



Mike told her once that he had been married twice. He also said it in the third person: He was married two times. Both times ended the same way. She left. He stayed.



Neither of them asked about the other's children. Trudy had a son, Jared, sixteen, who was in high school and whose relationship with his mother consisted of shared silence and the occasional text message that said I'm not coming home for dinner. Mike had a daughter, maybe two, he was not sure—he had not seen the first one in three years and had only a vague impression of the second, a girl with hair that reminded him of something he could not remember.



---



The shoebox was under Trudy's bed. It was a brown cardboard box, the kind that used to hold shoes—Nike, though the logo had faded to gray—and it had been repurposed for something else. Mike found it when he went to look for an extension cord in her apartment the second time he visited, which was in mid-November, and could not find the extension cord but found the box instead, because it was under the bed and Trudy never put things where you would look for them.



He opened the box. Inside were stones. Dozens of them. Small stones, medium stones, a few larger ones that might have been bricks broken by hand. Each one had a piece of tape on it, and on the tape was a date and a line of writing, in pencil, in handwriting so small that Mike had to squint to read it.



He sat on the floor with the box on his lap and read them.



November 3, 2008 — Plant closed.

December 15 — Jared asked why we don't have a tree.

February 2, 2009 — Walmart job.

June 18 — Teacher said he was sleeping in class.

August 30 — New backpack.

March 22 — Pharmacy gave only fifteen days.

March 25 — Bought three from next door.

April 10 — Stopped counting.



He read forty-two of them before Trudy came home from work. She stood in the doorway with her Walmart vest over her shoulders and her keys in her hand, and she looked at him sitting on the floor with the box, and her face did not change. It was not a shocked face or an angry face or a sad face. It was a face that said she had known he would find this eventually, and she had not worried about it because worrying would not have changed anything.



"Those are just stones," she said.



"They're not just stones."



"They're stones. I pick them up sometimes. When I'm at the river. When I can't sleep."



Mike looked at the stone in his hand—the forty-second one, dated April 10, which said Stopped counting. He turned it over in his fingers. It was smooth and gray and weighed maybe two ounces. It was a stone. It was also, apparently, a record of someone's life, carved into a material that would not rot or burn or dissolve.



"What do they mean?" he asked.



"Some of them are good. Some of them aren't. Most of them are just—days. Days that happened."



---



He was supposed to leave at 7:00 p.m. on a Thursday in March. He had packed his bag, loaded it into the truck, and driven to the exit of his apartment complex when his phone rang. It was a friend from the terminal—someone named Ray, who said he had heard something and wanted Mike to know it before anyone else did.



"Trudy Williams," Ray said. "You know her?"



"Yeah."



"She's not—she's gone. Overdose. Found her apartment this morning by the landlord, rent was two months late."



Mike said nothing. He was sitting in his truck, engine running, in the parking lot of the terminal on Livernois Avenue. A semi was backing up behind him, its reverser beeping in a rhythm that sounded almost like laughter.



"They think it was the pills," Ray said. "Oxy. She had a prescription. Maybe she took too many. Or maybe—"



"Maybe what?"



"Nothing. I shouldn't have called."



But he had called, and Mike was sitting in his truck with the phone pressed to his ear, listening to Ray hang up, listening to the reverser beep behind him, listening to the silence that followed.



Then he put the truck in gear and drove to 8 Mile Road.



---



Trudy's apartment was on the second floor of a brick building that had three units and a landlord who visited once a month to collect rent and once a year to look at things he did not want to see. Mike parked across the street and watched through the window.



The police car was there. So was an ambulance, though it was not moving, which meant it was probably there for paperwork. A neighbor stood on the sidewalk, talking to someone in a uniform.



Mike walked across the street and went into the building. The hallway smelled of boiled cabbage and cigarette smoke—the kind of smell that you carry out of a building on your clothes and think about for the rest of the day.



He went to Trudy's door. It was open. He could see inside—the living room with the television still on, the kitchen with the sink full of dishes, the bedroom with the bed unmade.



He went into the bedroom. The bed was unmade, as he said. The sheets were gray and wrinkled and smelled of the kind of sweat that comes from sleeping in clothes you have been wearing all day. On the nightstand was a bottle of OxyContin, open, with twelve pills left in it. The prescription had been filled on March 22, and there were supposed to be thirty.



Mike did not touch the bottle. He walked back to the living room, knelt down, and looked under the sofa. Nothing useful. He stood up, walked to the bedroom, and looked under the bed.



He found the shoebox.



He sat on the floor with the box on his lap and read the stones. He read all of them—eighty-one entries, each one a date and a fact, each one a stone that someone had picked up at a river and put in a box and labeled like a diary that would never be read by anyone but the person who made it.



The last one was number 81, undated, and on it Trudy had written, in letters so small he could barely read them: Didn't want to.



Mike closed the box, stood up, and walked out of the apartment. He did not look back.



---



He drove to Flint, then to Detroit, then to the I-75 corridor, driving through the night because the alternative was sitting in a parking lot and thinking about a shoebox full of stones, and he had done enough thinking for one lifetime.



The shoebox was in the passenger seat of his truck. He reached over and opened it once, in the dark, at a rest stop outside Monroe. Stone number 81 caught the dashboard light, and he read the words one more time: Didn't want to.



He closed the box and put it on the floor between the seats. He kept driving.



The sun came up over the river. It was pale and watery and unimpressive, the kind of sunrise that you see through fog. Mike drove toward it, hands on the wheel, the truck's suspension groaning with every bump, the road stretching ahead for another hundred miles before he would stop and sleep and do it all again.



He took his hands off the wheel for one second. Then he put them back on.



---



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