The Ladder

There is a light bulb over the history section that has been out since roughly the Truman administration, and on Monday I decided, with the reckless energy of a woman who has had two cups of coffee and no customers, that today was the day.

The trouble is the ceiling in that corner. R&C is an old building, and old buildings do not believe in level floors or reachable fixtures. The bulb sits up in a kind of pocket where the ceiling steps down over the history alcove, and to get at it you need the tall ladder, and the tall ladder lives in the back behind the boxes I keep meaning to sort, guarded by cobwebs and a mop that hasn't mopped in living memory.

I got the ladder. This was the first mistake, in the sense that everything downstream of it was also a mistake, but you have to start somewhere.

Reagan supervised. Reagan loves the ladder. The ladder means I am going Up, and Up is fascinating to a dog, because dogs believe the floor is the natural and correct place for a person to be, and any deviation from the floor is either an emergency or a game, and he hasn't decided which, so he stays close to monitor developments.

I set the ladder. I tested it. I climbed it with a fresh bulb in my shirt pocket like a woman who knew what she was doing, and I got up level with the fixture, and I discovered that the fixture was a good ten inches farther away than it had looked from the ground.

This is the eternal law of the light bulb. It is always ten inches farther than it looks. You could measure it, you could plan for it, and still, at the top of the ladder, there would be those ten inches, waiting.

So I leaned. Just a little. The way you do. The way everyone does and everyone's mother warned them not to.

Below me, Reagan let out a low whine of professional concern.

"I'm fine," I told the dog.

I was not fine. I was extended off the side of a ladder in an empty bookstore reaching for a fixture with one hand while the other hand held a light bulb, and my whole center of gravity had migrated out over the history section like it was trying to leave the country. The ladder made a sound. Ladders should not make sounds.

And of course—of course—that is the exact moment the bell over the door rang.

I couldn't turn around. I said, to the ceiling, in the strangled voice of a woman pretending everything is normal, "With you in one second!"

"Take your time," said Theo Bell.

I could not see him but I could hear him, and I could hear him cross the store, and I could hear him stop at the bottom of the ladder and take in the entire situation—the lean, the bulb, the dog, the sound the ladder was making—with the silence of a man who has watched every fool in this town do something exactly like this at least once.

He did not tell me to come down. He did not lecture. He put one hand on the ladder, flat, steadying it, taking the wobble out of it, and he said, "Go on, then."

So I went on. I got the old bulb out and the new bulb in, and the light came up warm and yellow over the history section for the first time since I'd owned the place, and it was, honestly, a small miracle, thirty years of shadow lifted for four dollars and a near-death experience.

I came down. Theo let go of the ladder.

"You want the shorter ladder for that," he said. "This one's too tall. Puts you leaning." He'd bought nothing, as usual. He'd come in for no reason, as usual, and arrived at precisely the moment a person needed a hand on a ladder, which is not as much of a coincidence as it sounds, because Theo Bell has spent his whole life walking into rooms right when the ladder starts making the sound.

"I'll get the shorter ladder," I said.

"You won't. You'll do it exactly like this next time too." He was already turning to go. "Light looks good, though."

It does look good. I keep finding reasons to walk past the history section just to stand in it. And I have not gotten the shorter ladder, and I'm not going to, and Theo knows I'm not going to, and somehow that's the most neighborly thing about the whole exchange—that he told me the right way to do it and we both understood I'd keep doing it wrong, and that he'd keep a hand on the ladder anyway.