Composition Book

The Habit

Chapter 1: Composition Book

The doctor did not use the word dangerous. He used the word concerning, which was worse, because concerning was the word you used when you wanted the other person to worry without being able to blame you for scaring them.

"One-fifty-eight over one-oh-two," Dr. Halloran said. He was reading from the printout as if it contained someone else's numbers. "That's up from your last visit."

"How much?"

"Enough." Halloran set the printout on the counter and crossed his arms. He was a short man with thick fingers who had been Noel's GP for nine years and had never once asked him a question that wasn't medical. "You on anything for it?"

"Lisinopril. Ten milligrams."

"Since when?"

"Last March."

"And you're taking it."

"Every morning."

Halloran looked at the printout again as if the numbers might have changed while he wasn't watching. They had not.

"You exercise?"

"I walk the sites."

"That's work. I mean exercise."

"No."

"Drink?"

"Some."

"Define some."

"A beer at night. Sometimes two."

Halloran nodded the way a building inspector nods at a crack he can't call cosmetic. Noel recognized the gesture. He used it himself, three or four times a week, standing in someone else's crawl space with a flashlight and a clipboard, looking at the place where the foundation had decided to let go.

"I want to bump you to twenty milligrams," Halloran said. "And I want you to consider finding a way to process."

"Process what?"

"Whatever's sitting on your chest. You carry it in your numbers, Noel. Your labs are fine. Your heart is fine. Your kidneys are doing their job. But something is pushing this up, and it's not the sodium."

He wrote the new prescription on the pad and tore it off. He did not elaborate on what he meant by process. He did not suggest a therapist. He said, "Some of my patients write things down. Helps them set it somewhere that isn't their bloodstream."

Noel took the prescription. He did not argue. He was not a man who argued with people who were trying to help him. He was a man who took their advice, drove home, and decided later whether to follow it.

---

The drive from Halloran's office to Noel's house was eleven minutes on surface streets. He knew the route the way he knew the layout of his own body — without thinking, the turns arriving in his hands before his eyes needed to confirm them. East on Magnolia. Right on Martin Luther King Jr. Left on Linden. Past the church — Mt. Olive Baptist, white clapboard, steeple that needed painting, parking lot empty on a Wednesday afternoon — and up the hill to the third house on the left.

It was a small house. Two bedrooms, one bathroom, a kitchen that opened into a living room that had once been two rooms before someone knocked out the wall in the seventies. The exterior was painted the color that all houses in this neighborhood were painted: a white that had given up and settled for gray. The porch wrapped around the south side and sagged where the railing met the corner post. He had noticed the sag eighteen months ago. He had not fixed it.

The house had been his mother's. Before that, it had been his parents'. He had inherited it four years ago, when Ruth Ware died in the back bedroom at sixty-three, and he had moved in the same week because the alternative was watching a stranger buy it at the estate sale, and the idea of a stranger sleeping in the room where his mother had slept was the one thing he could not make himself permit.

He parked in the driveway — cracked concrete, crabgrass in the seams — and sat in the truck for a moment. The afternoon heat pressed against the windshield. June in Knoxville was not yet the worst of it, but it was close enough to make the air inside the cab thicken against the skin. He opened the door. Got out. Walked up the porch steps, and the third step gave its usual groan, and the screen door complained on its hinges, and he was inside.

"Faucet's dripping," he said.

He was talking to the house. He did this. Not prayers, not conversation — just observations delivered to the walls and floors and pipes as if they were an animal he was responsible for. The house received these statements the way it received everything: with the patience of a structure that had been standing since 1946 and intended to keep standing whether anyone spoke to it or not.

He set his keys on the counter. The kitchen faucet was dripping. Not fast — one drop every three or four seconds, a small silver bead forming at the lip of the spout and releasing when gravity won the argument with surface tension. He had noticed it a week ago. The washer was shot. The hardware store on Chapman Highway was out of the size he needed until Thursday.

He opened the refrigerator. The light inside was the brightest thing in the kitchen. He took out a can of peaches — sliced, in heavy syrup, store brand — and opened it with the manual opener that had been in the third drawer since before he was born. He ate them standing at the counter, drinking the syrup last, the way he always did. The syrup tasted the way the kitchen had smelled when he was eight years old and his mother was still the person who decided what the rooms were for.

He did not sit down.

He rinsed the can. Dropped it in the recycling. Wiped the counter. The faucet dripped.

---

The composition book was in a plastic bag on the passenger seat of his truck.

He had stopped at the Dollar General on the way home from the doctor's office. He had not planned to stop. The parking lot had pulled him in the way certain parking lots do when you are driving without destination and the car makes the decision for you. Inside, he had walked past the cleaning supplies and the off-brand cereal and the aisle of things that cost exactly one dollar and found the school supplies. Notebooks. Folders. Pens in packs of twelve.

The composition book was black and white, the marbled cover that every school notebook has had since 1950. It cost a dollar twenty-nine. He paid in cash because paying cash for a notebook felt less like committing to something than using a card.

Now the notebook was on the kitchen table. He had pulled it out of the bag and set it there, cover up, and it sat in the center of the table with the same quiet authority that an unopened Bible carries in a room where no one reads the Bible anymore.

He did not know why he thought of that comparison. He was not a man who thought in terms of Bibles.

He sat down.

The chair was wooden, straight-backed, one of four that had come with the table. The table had been his mother's. The chairs had been his mother's. The kitchen had been his mother's. He lived in the spaces she had shaped, surrounded by the furniture she had chosen, and the fact that he had not replaced a single piece in four years was not sentimentality. It was the path of least resistance. The things were here. He was here. Changing them would require caring about the arrangement of a life he had not arranged.

He opened the composition book.

The pages were lined. College-ruled. The first page was blank and very white and the lines were the pale blue of a sky seen through a dirty window. He picked up a pen — a ballpoint, black ink, the kind that comes in a ten-pack at the same Dollar General — and pressed the tip to the paper.

Nothing came.

He sat there. The pen rested against the first line. The faucet dripped in the background, measuring the silence in intervals of four seconds.

He was not a writer. He had not written anything longer than an inspection report since high school. He did not keep a diary. He did not journal. The word journal, used as a verb, made him feel the way a carpenter feels when someone calls a two-by-four a piece of wood — technically correct and completely wrong.

Halloran had said: write things down. He had not said what things.

Noel wrote what was true.

Faucet's dripping again. Called the hardware store, they're out of the washer I need until Thursday. The persistence of it.

He looked at what he had written. Three lines. The handwriting was small and even, the letters pressed into the page with the controlled force of a man who had spent twenty years holding clipboards in wind.

The persistence of it. He had not planned to write that. The sentence had arrived the way water arrives at the lowest point in a yard — not because it was aimed there but because there was nowhere else for it to go. He did not know what the it referred to. The faucet, probably. What else would it be.

He closed the notebook. Capped the pen. Set both on the table, side by side, aligned with the edge.

He stood. He washed the pen's handprint off his thumb — a black smudge where he had pressed too hard without noticing. He pressed his thumb into the center of his other palm, a habit so old he did not know he was doing it. The flesh whitened under the pressure. He held it for three seconds, then released. The color returned in a slow bloom.

He turned off the kitchen light.

The house settled. The faucet dripped. Three drops, each one catching the last of the light from the window above the sink. Then silence. Then three more.

He went to bed.

The composition book sat on the table in the dark, closed, waiting, the first page already carrying the weight of three sentences that meant nothing and might, if the man came back tomorrow, begin to mean something else.

The house made its sounds. He made his.