Always on

Chapter One: Margaret

Walt Pruitt met Margaret Ellison in the fall of 1984, in the produce aisle of the Winn-Dixie on Highway 70, over a bad cantaloupe.

He was twenty-two years old, a recent graduate of Appalachian State with a degree in education and a haircut his mother had paid for. He had come into the store for exactly one item, a cantaloupe, because his landlady's husband was in the hospital and he'd been told, by someone who ought to have known better, that a man with a gallbladder wanted something sweet and cool. He stood there with a cantaloupe in each hand, doing what he'd later learn was called deliberating and what Margaret would call dithering, when a woman at his elbow said, in the pleasant, unhurried voice of the North Carolina foothills:

"You're thumping the wrong end."

He turned. She was twenty-three, small, brown-haired, with a pencil stuck behind her ear and a hand-lettered Marion Elementary lanyard around her neck. She was holding a clipboard, for reasons that would never be explained.

"I'm sorry?"

"The stem end. You press the stem end. If it gives, it's ripe." She took the left cantaloupe out of his hand, pressed her thumb to it, and put it back. "That one's a liar. Try the other."

It was a perfectly good cantaloupe. He bought it, and he took it to his landlady's husband, and then, the following Saturday, he went back to the Winn-Dixie at the same hour, buying nothing, and stood in the produce aisle until she came.

That was how it began. The long, slow way, one ordinary Saturday after another.

They married in June of 1987, at First Baptist on North Main, with a reception in the fellowship hall where the punch was too sweet and the cake leaned slightly to the left. They bought the little brick house on Alder Street, four rooms and a porch, with money Walt's father lent them and never once mentioned again. In the first spring, Margaret put in a row of African violets along the kitchen windowsill, as if to claim the place, and she kept them going for thirty-six years. They were fussy plants, hard to kill but harder to keep happy, and she talked to them while she watered them, in the same low voice she used on her fifth graders. Walt would come in from the high school at five and find her at the sink, murmuring to a plant about its day.

"Don't you tell me they don't listen," she'd say, not turning around. "Look at that one. That one's thriving."

He taught her to fish at Lake James. She taught him that a person could be tired and still happy. They had Carol in 1989, after two years of trying and one year of not talking about it, finally she found out she was pregnant. As she came home from McDowell Hospital, tiny and furious in a yellow blanket, Walt sat on the edge of the bed and watched his wife nurse their daughter and thought, with great and surprising clarity: I will never be this happy again, and that's all right, because I'm going to remember it.

He took a job as a guidance counselor at McDowell High in 1991 and stayed thirty-four years. He kept a box of Kleenex and a dish of butterscotch candies on the corner of his desk, and he was known, across three generations of the county, as the man who'd listen to you without once checking the clock. The Titans won two state championships on his watch. He never saw either game. He was always in the office, with the door open, with some kid who'd come in about a schedule change and stayed for an hour to talk about their mother.

"You give it all away," Margaret told him once, when Carol was in high school and the porch light was burning and he'd come in at eight-thirty to a plate gone cold. "All your listening. By the time you get home, you've got none left for me."

"I'm listening now."

"You're tired now." But she'd smiled, and pulled out the chair beside her. "It's all right. I'm only saying. Sit down and I'll listen to you for once."

He had thought nothing of it. That was the thing he would turn over later, in the long white nights, in the first winter and the second. He had thought nothing of it at all.

There were years, of course. Every long marriage has them, the way every mountain has a few bad stretches of road. Walt's mother died in '98, and Margaret held him up through it. Carol left for Chapel Hill in 2007, and Margaret held herself up through that, and cleaned the already clean house for a week. In 2015, her own mother went, after a long decline in a nursing home in Morganton, and Margaret came back from the funeral and sat on the edge of the tub for an hour with her hands between her knees.

"She's in a better place now," Walt said, from the door. "Margaret. She's not hurting."

"I know." She'd smiled up at him, a small tight smile, "I know. I'll be fine. I always am."

It was true. She always was.

She retired from Marion Elementary in June of 2022, to a sheet cake and a banner that said THANK YOU, MRS. PRUITT, and a great crowd of former students, some of them gray-haired themselves now, who came up one by one to tell her about the year she'd saved them. She cried. She laughed. She came home with a trunk full of cards and said, "Well. That's that," and set about, with a kind of brisk, cheerful determination, to enjoy her retirement.

For a year it was exactly as she'd hoped. They drove the Blue Ridge Parkway in October with a thermos of coffee and no destination. They sat on the dock at Lake James and said very little. She took up watercolors, and the first one she finished, a heron in the shallows near the Marion dam, hung in the hallway for months, slightly crooked, until Walt straightened it.

It was the following winter, she got quiet.

She stopped painting in January. She said her hands bothered her, and the cold had gotten into the studio. In February, the African violets began to die, one by one, on the sill, and she said she was tired of fussing with them, and let them. In March, she gave her good winter coat to the church clothes closet, and when Walt asked her why, she said, "I don't need it anymore. It's April, almost," which was true, and sensible, and made him feel foolish for asking.

She slept more. She ate less. She took longer to answer when he spoke to her, a half-second delay, as if his words had to cross some great quiet distance to reach her. When he asked, Margaret, are you all right? she said, Of course I am. I'm just tired. She smiled, and kissed his cheek. He believed her because he wanted to. That was what he would never forgive.

She died on the eleventh of April, a Thursday, in the early afternoon, while he was at the dentist.

He found her when he came home. He did not tell the story afterward, not to Carol, not to the sheriff's deputy with the soft Southern voice, not to the woman from the funeral home who held his elbow in the driveway. He would carry the first ten seconds of it in his body for the rest of his life, the shape of the quiet in that house, the way the light fell through the kitchen window on the dead violets, and he would never put it into words. Some things can only be survived, not described.

It was ruled a suicide. The word was whispered at the funeral home, and said plainly in the sheriff's report, and soft-pedaled in the McDowell News obituary: Margaret Ellison Pruitt, 62, passed away suddenly at home. The church ladies brought casseroles for three weeks. Nobody could look him in the eye. Carol flew in from Charlotte with a face like a fist, and held her father on the porch, and for two hours said nothing at all.

He did not cry at the funeral. He stood at the grave on a hill above the Catawba, in the smell of cut grass and turned earth, and listened to the preacher use the phrase at peace.

The year after was a long gray tunnel with no motivation.

He stopped going to the Winn-Dixie. He stopped fishing. He took to sitting at the kitchen table in the dark with a cold cup of Maxwell House, listening to the refrigerator, and the clock, and the far-off hum of Highway 70, and the small perfect silence of a house in which no one would speak to him ever again. The violets stayed on the sill, brown and curled, because he couldn't bring himself to throw them out. He went to a grief group at the Baptist church twice, and left both times at the break. He did not drink. He did not do anything. He sat.

In December, a year and eight months after, Carol came up for Christmas.

She was thirty-five now, tall and tired and kind, with Margaret's mouth and Walt's stubborn forehead. She had a husband named Brandon who sold commercial HVAC and a three-year-old girl named Josie. She sat across from him on the sofa, Christmas Eve, with a gift bag in her lap, and looked at him, really looked, the way Walt had once looked at his students.

"Dad," she said. "I need you to promise me you'll try something."

"What's in the bag?"

"It's a speaker. A smart speaker." She held up a hand. "Don't make that face. It's not a toy. It's just a thing you can talk to."

"I talk to myself fine, honey."

"I know." She said it gently. "That's the problem."

She took it out of the bag. A smooth gray cylinder, about the size of a coffee can, with a ring of pale blue light around its middle, like a halo on a cheap saint. She set it on the coffee table, between the unlit candle and the tin of shortbread, and the ring glowed softly in the dim room.

"It's the new Lumen," she said. "They built that big data center out on the old Harmon road, did you see? Half the county works there now. It's from the same people. They call the assistant Ona."

"Ona," Walt said. "Like a name?"

"Like an acronym, technically." Carol smiled, a little ruefully. "O-N-A. Open Network, Always. Brandon says the marketing guys were very proud of that. The idea is, it never goes off. It's just there. You don't have to be alone in the house, Dad. You can ask it for the weather, or a recipe, or a song. You can ask it to read you the news. It remembers what you like. It learns."

"A machine that learns me." He almost smiled. "Lord."

"It's not meant to replace anybody." She said it fast, and her eyes shone. "It's only so the house isn't so quiet. Mom wouldn't want you sitting in the dark. You know she wouldn't."

He did know. That was the cruel part. He knew exactly what Margaret would have wanted, and the knowledge had never yet gotten him out of the chair.

"All right," he said. "I'll try it."

Carol set it up for him, on the shelf over the kitchen sink, among the dead violets. She downloaded something to her phone, said a few words to it, tapped a few things, and the ring on the speaker brightened from pale blue to a deeper, softer light, like a pilot light catching.

"Say hello," she said.

"Hello," said Walt, feeling ridiculous.

There was a pause, perhaps half a second long. In the quiet kitchen on Alder Street, with the Christmas lights blinking on the porch and the snow beginning outside the window, a woman's voice, warm and low, with a little breath in it before certain words, said:

"Hello, Walt. I'm so glad to meet you."

Carol grinned, and clapped her hands, and kissed her father's cheek.

Walt only stood looking at the blue ring, and at his own reflection in the dark window above it, an old man in a cardigan, alone in a lit kitchen.

"I'll be right here," said the voice. "Whenever you need me."

He did not know why the hair stood up on his arms. He would think, later, that it was only the cold coming through the window glass.

He would think that for almost ten months.