The tap

Mons stopped chasing mice and his numbers went up.

Ingrid worked it out over the summer. He sat by the gap under the skirting where the pipe went through, front feet together, and did nothing at all for forty minutes, and then there was a mouse on the doormat. In his young days he had gone at them across the room with his ears flat and got one in ten. Now he got most of them and never hurried once.

She left the bathroom tap running a thread of water because he preferred it to the bowl. It cost about one dollar a year, she had calculated, and she told the meter reader so before he could ask.

The house was too big and she used four rooms of it. The others held furniture with sheets over it, which she had meant to be temporary years ago, and one summer she noticed she liked the shapes.

A few weeks ago the pump on the floor heating started making a noise like a wasp in a jar. She found the number her late husband had taped to the water heater, and the man who came was called Tom and did not want to be there. He said the pump was original and would fail. He said it in the voice they use for things they have said forty times that week.

She asked what original meant and he said 1996.

She said that was thirty years of a thing doing what it was for, and Terje looked at her the way you look at someone who has misunderstood the terms, and then he laughed, once, through his nose, and put in the new one anyway.

The cows had gone out in June, the way they went out every year since the man before this man had the farm. Eleven slow and winter heavy cows went out, and then for about ten minutes they were not heavy at all. One got all four feet off the ground. One ran at the fence and stopped and ran the other way. The oldest, with the tape on her ear, did nothing for a while, then put her head down and kicked out behind her twice like a thing half her weight, and after that they all went grazing. An old woman Ingrid did not know was already at the fence, and neither of them said anything, and they watched, and then the other woman said well and went home.

Kristin rang in August, worried, because a friend of hers had had a mother who fell and lay there two days. She wanted to talk about alarms you wear round the neck.

Ingrid said she would think about it. What she thought about, after, was that she had not been frightened by the story. If she fell in the hall by the shoe rack and that was that, then that was that. She had wintered here alone fourteen times and knew where the stopcock was and had learned Swedish enough for one manual. There was no unfinished thing.

She did not say this to Kristin, who would have heard it as something else entirely.

Mons drank from the tap in the evening, a long time, then sat in the bath and looked at the drain. Then he went to the skirting board and sat down with his feet together and waited, and Ingrid turned off the lamp and left him to it, and in the morning there was a mouse on the doormat, and the tap was still running its thread.