The gravel drive cracked beneath Wendell Marsh's boots as he stepped out of the cab, and the sound carried further than it should have across the empty yard. Late October had stripped the maples to bone, and the farmhouse sat at the center of them like something held up by habit alone. The porch sagged on its south corner where frost had heaved the post. Paint curled away from the clapboards in long, papery strips, and a shutter hung loose from the second-floor window, tapping a slow, arrhythmic tattoo against the frame.
Wendell set his duffel on the porch step and listened.
Nothing. Just the wind moving through the orchard, and somewhere out past the barn a crow working the weather.
He pulled the ring of keys from his coat pocket and looked at them as though they were a problem to be solved. Two were for the house. One was for the barn. One was small and unfamiliar, the metal dull with age. A folded paper had been rubber-banded to the ring, and he left it for the moment while he found the right key and worked it into the deadbolt. The lock resisted. He leaned into it, shoulder against the door, and felt the tumblers finally turn over with a sound like a bone setting.
Inside, the house remembered his uncle's last week. A plate on the kitchen table, crusted with something dark. A mug of coffee, dried to a brown ring at the bottom. The linoleum, yellowed and lifting at the seams, exhaled a stale, sweet reek of age and kerosene and the particular must that belongs to a place sealed too long.
"Hello?" Wendell called, though he knew.
The house did not answer.
He set his duffel on the floor and let his hand rest on the back of a chair. The chair was a ladder-back, the seat woven from corn husk, and his palm found a worn place at the top of one rung that might have been his father's hand, might have been his uncle's. He could not tell the difference, and that bothered him more than it should.
The kitchen was the smallest room of three down, and it opened through a doorway into a parlor where the morning light came in pale and slanted through unwashed glass. The rug was the color of weak tea and rolled back at one corner, exposing floorboards that had been painted, at some point, the green of a pine needle. Bookshelves lined the far wall, most of them bare. A few spines leaned together like tired men.
On the parlor desk there was a brown accordion file, fat with envelopes, and beside it a wooden box with a hinged lid. The box was small enough to cup in both hands. Wendell touched it but did not open it. He turned to the file instead.
The first envelope was a bill from the county electric co-op. The second was a bill from the propane company. The third was a notice of intent to lien from the state of the highway, regarding a culvert on the north boundary. A fourth was a letter from a lawyer in Brattleboro that had been opened and read, the letterhead torn at the top, and the words legal and estate and without further action circled once in pencil. A fifth was a death certificate of a great-uncle Wendell had met four times in his life.
He sat down with the file in his lap. The chair complained under him. He read the death certificate through twice, slowly, as though the words might change if he gave them time. His uncle had died on a Tuesday. The body had been found by a neighbor who had come by with a chain saw because a maple at the road had come down in a storm. The neighbor had knocked. The neighbor had waited. The neighbor had let himself in.
Wendell set the certificate aside and went through the rest of the stack. Most of it was the ordinary paper decay of a life that had stopped being tended: catalogs, fund-raising letters, a flyer for a county fair two years gone, a postcard from a niece in Ohio. Near the bottom of the stack, he found a smaller envelope, unsealed, with his name written on the front in a hand that was not his uncle's. The hand was careful. The hand had learned its letters late, or had been taught them with a great deal of patience.
Inside the envelope was a single sheet of paper and a key.
The key was the small one from the ring.
The paper was a deed to the property, signed and stamped by the town clerk, transferring the house, the barn, the orchard, and forty-two acres more or less, to Wendell Marsh, in trust, for his sons Caleb and Ezra, and their heirs. The transfer had been recorded on the day his uncle had been found, and the lawyer's name on the letterhead was the same lawyer's name as on the letter in the stack, and that was how Wendell understood that his uncle had not died unprepared. He had known he would not be the one to come out of the house.
Wendell folded the deed and put it back in the envelope and put the envelope in his coat pocket. He turned the key over in his palm. The metal was warm against his skin, as though someone had been holding it just before.
"You found it, then," a voice said from the doorway.
Wendell did not startle. He had heard the footsteps on the porch, the creak of the third step, and the soft thud of the screen door being eased open. He turned in the chair.
Caleb Thorne stood on the threshold with his hands in the pockets of a coat that was too thin for Vermont in October. His hair was darker than Wendell remembered, or perhaps it had always been that dark and Wendell had been remembering his own. He was leaner. There were new lines around his mouth.
"Mara called me," Caleb said. "She thought you might need someone to talk you out of selling."
"I haven't decided anything," Wendell said.
"You haven't decided in twenty minutes," Caleb said. He crossed the room without asking, looked out the window at the orchard, and nodded once to himself. "How bad is it?"
"The roof on the east side. The porch post. The window." Wendell paused. "The wiring, probably. There's a notice about the culvert."
"And the inside?"
"Needs work."
Caleb turned and looked at the kitchen doorway, then at the staircase that rose along the parlor wall. The treads were carpeted with a runner that had been a deep red once and was now the color of dried blood. The newel post at the bottom was carved with a pattern Wendell had always been told was a family thing, though no one had ever explained what the pattern was.
"I'll take the upstairs," Caleb said. "You take the cellar. If there's a body in a rocking chair I want advance warning."
"There isn't a body."
"You don't know that."
Wendell stood and set the file on the desk. The wood of the desk was scarred with the rings of a hundred coffee cups and the ink of a hundred bills paid. He picked up the wooden box but did not open it. He carried it to the kitchen and set it on the counter.
"What is it?" Caleb asked from the parlor.
"A box."
"Thanks, Wendell. Real useful."
"It was on the desk."
Caleb came and stood in the doorway. He had his head tilted, and his eyes were moving over the box as though he were reading it. Caleb had been a man who taught English at a university in a city that started with B, and before that he had been a man who read books the way other men drank, and before that he had been a man who could not stay in a room if the room had a lock on the inside.
"You going to open it?" Caleb asked.
Wendell put his hand on the lid. The wood was cool. The hinges were tight.
"I don't know," he said.
"That's not an answer."
"It's the only one I have."
Caleb looked at him for a long moment, and then he looked away. He took his hands out of his pockets and set them on the counter beside the box, and he did not touch the lid, but his fingers were close enough that Wendell could feel the heat of his hands across the wood.
"Open it later," Caleb said. "After you've walked the property. After you've seen what's in the cellar. After you've stood in the orchard long enough that the crows know you."
"Why?"
"Because if there's anything in that box that wants a witness, I want it to have the wrong one."
Wendell left his hand on the lid for a count of three and then stepped back.
"All right," he said. "The property first."
They took the porch steps at the same time and crossed the yard together, the gravel shifting under their boots. The barn was the closer of the outbuildings, and they went to it first. The big doors were warped and resisted, but the smaller door beside them opened with a pull and a complaint. Inside, the light came in long bands through the roof slats, and the dust motes turned in it like something patient. A tractor sat at the far end with a tarp over it, and a workbench ran the length of the side wall, and the pegboard above it still held the shapes of tools that had been taken away. There was the smell of old oil and old hay and the cool mineral smell of stone walls.
Caleb walked the length of the barn without speaking, his boots making a soft sound on the packed earth floor. He paused at the workbench and ran his hand along it and looked at the dust on his fingers as though he were reading something in it.
"Your uncle kept this place," he said.
"He didn't keep much of anything," Wendell said.
"He kept enough to find you."
Wendell did not answer that. He went to the tractor and pulled back the tarp. The tractor was an old Ford, the paint sun-faded, the seat cracked, the steering wheel wrapped in electrical tape that had gone brittle. He put his hand on the hood and felt the metal give, faintly, to his weight.
"Will it run?" Caleb asked.
"Probably not."
"Probably."
"I can run it," Wendell said.
"I know you can."
They went out the small door and across the yard and through a gate in a fence that leaned in the direction of prevailing weather. The orchard was on the other side of the fence, and the trees were old and planted in rows that were no longer rows, and the grass between them was long and silvered with the season. The apples that had not been picked had fallen and were softening into the ground, and the smell of them was sweet and a little wrong, the way fruit smells when it has been forgotten.
Caleb stopped at the first row of trees and looked down the length of the orchard. The trees went on further than he had expected, and the land at the far end dipped into a fold that he could not see over.
"How many acres?" he asked.
"Forty-two, the deed says."
"And this is all orchard?"
"No. There's pasture to the west. There's woods to the north. There's the creek."
"The creek that has the culvert problem?"
"Yes."
Caleb nodded. He walked between two of the trees and stopped again. He was looking at something on the bark of the nearest one, and Wendell went to him and looked, and there was a mark on the bark at about the height of Caleb's hand. It was a carving. It was not a fresh carving. The bark had grown around it and partially closed over it, but the shape was still visible, and the shape was the same pattern as the newel post in the house.
"That's the same," Caleb said.
"Yes," Wendell said.
"Was that your uncle's mark?"
"I don't know."
"Your father's?"
"I don't know that either."
Caleb reached out and touched the bark around the carving with one finger, and he did not touch the carving itself.
"Wendell," he said.
"What."
"Did your father ever talk about this place?"
"He talked about the work."
"He talked about the work. Did he talk about the house?"
"He said it was paid for."
"And?"
Wendell was quiet for a moment. The wind came through the orchard and moved the leaves that were left, and the leaves made a sound like paper being turned.
"He said," Wendell said, slowly, "that the house would outlast the family."
Caleb did not answer. He looked at Wendell for a long count, and then he looked back at the carving.
"Come on," he said. "Show me the cellar."
The cellar door was at the back of the kitchen, where it had always been. Wendell took the hook from the nail and pulled the door up, and the smell came out first, the way it always did: cold earth, wet stone, the faint sweet rot of apples that had rolled under the bins years ago and never been retrieved.
Caleb flicked the light switch at the top of the stairs. Nothing happened.
"It's on a separate breaker," Wendell said. "In the pantry."
He went and flipped it, and the bare bulb at the bottom of the stairs came on, a yellow circle on the stone floor. They went down. The stairs were wooden, narrow, and the third one from the bottom gave the way it always had. Wendell stepped over it without comment. Caleb noticed, said nothing, and stepped over it too.
The main room of the cellar was about twenty feet by thirty, with a stone floor and a low ceiling of rough-hewn beams. The bins along the east wall held the last of the harvest, apples in wooden crates, squash in mesh bags, a few late cabbages with their roots still dusty. A workbench ran along the west wall, with the tools of preservation: a cider press, a rack of sealed jars, a grinder bolted to the wood. A cast-iron stove sat in the corner with a length of stovepipe that ran up through the ceiling, cold now since before the first frost.
Wendell stood at the bottom of the stairs and let Caleb look.
"The whole cellar," Caleb said.
"No."
"No?"
"There's the cold room behind the wall. With the door."
Caleb turned his head. The wall behind the workbench was not the outside wall; there was another room beyond it, and the door was set into the stone with an iron latch. Wendell crossed the floor, and his boots left prints in the fine dust that had settled since the last time he'd come down here, which had been to check the jars in October, he thought. October. Possibly earlier.
He lifted the latch and pulled the door open. The hinges did not creak. They were well oiled, and he had not oiled them.
The cold room was smaller, maybe ten feet square, with a stone floor that sloped slightly toward a drain in the center. The ceiling was lower, and there were no beams; the stone of the foundation arched up to meet the floor joists of the house above. Shelves ran along three walls, and on the shelves were more jars, older jars, the glass clouded and the contents unidentifiable. A wooden crate sat in the corner with rope handles. A coil of wire hung from a nail.
And at the far end, where the foundation wall met the floor, there was another door.
Caleb had followed him in, and he was standing just inside the cold room, looking at the shelves, at the jars, at the things that had been put here and not touched in years. His eyes moved across them with the quick cataloging gaze Wendell remembered from years ago, when Caleb had come out the first time with Vivienne's younger sister, when they were still new, before the university and the leaving and the long years of not speaking.
"Those jars," Caleb said. "When were those put down?"
"I don't know."
"Your father?"
"I don't know, Caleb."
Caleb did not push it. He looked at the crate in the corner, and he did not open it. He looked at the coil of wire, and he left it on the nail.
"The other door," he said.
"Yes."
"What is it?"
"I don't know," Wendell said, for the third time, and the word came out harder than he meant it to. He heard it in his own mouth and did not soften it. Some things did not get softened by softening.
Caleb looked at him, and then he looked at the door.
The door was not like the cellar door above, or the cold room door. It was iron, dark, set into the stone with no frame visible. The surface of it was not flat. From where Wendell stood, he could see the pattern raised into the metal: circles, one inside the other, five of them at least, and inside the smallest circle, a mark that might have been a letter in a language he did not read. The handle was a ring of the same iron, and the hinges were on the inside, which meant the door had been hung to open inward, into whatever was on the other side.
The edges of the door, where it met the stone, were black with a substance that was not rust and not paint. It had the look of something that had been applied hot and had cooled into a seal.
Wendell crossed the cold room. His boots sounded loud on the stone. When he was within a foot of the door, he stopped.
"It's warm," he said.
Caleb stepped forward, and he put the back of his hand against the iron, held it there for a moment, and then pulled it back.
"It's not warm," Caleb said. "It's the cold room. Everything in here is cold. The door is the same temperature as the wall."
"No," Wendell said. "It's warm. Feel it again."
Caleb looked at him, and then he put his hand back against the door, and held it longer this time, and Wendell watched his face.
"It's cooler than the wall," Caleb said. "Wendell, it's the same as the wall."
"No."
"What are you feeling?"
Wendell did not answer. He put his own hand against the iron. The metal was the temperature of skin. Not cold. Not warm. The temperature of a living thing.
"There's something on the other side," he said.
"What?"
"I don't know. Listen."
He stepped back and held his hand up, and Caleb was quiet, and they both stood there in the cold room with the jars and the wire and the old crate, and they listened.
At first there was nothing. The house above them was quiet. The wind outside was quiet. The cellar was the quietest place on the property, the place where the sound of the world thinned out and left only the small sounds of stone settling and wood drying.
Then, from behind the door, from the other side of the iron, there came a sound.
It was faint. It was the sound of something moving against stone, a small repeated motion, the kind of sound a branch would make if a branch were dragging itself across a rock face. It came in a rhythm. It came and it went. It came and it went.
Scratching.
Caleb heard it. Wendell saw him hear it, because Caleb's chin came up, and his eyes went to the door, and his weight shifted forward onto the balls of his feet.
"That's not pipes," Caleb said.
"No."
"That's not an animal."
"No."
"What is it?"
Wendell did not answer. He was looking at the concentric circles on the door, at the way the pattern seemed to move in the bare light of the cold room bulb, as if the light were not steady but breathing.
"Don't touch the circles," he said.
"I wasn't going to."
"I mean it, Caleb."
"I heard you."
They stood there. The scratching went on, and then it stopped, and the silence it left was heavier than the sound had been. Wendell could feel the weight of the house above them, the weight of the orchard, the weight of the forty-two acres that the deed said were his, and he could feel, under his boots, through the stone of the floor, the faintest pulse, as if the earth itself had a heartbeat and it had decided, just now, to let him know.
Caleb was looking at him.
"Does Vivienne know about this door?"
"No."
"Your father?"
"I don't know."
"Your grandfather?"
"I never met my grandfather. He died before I was born. My father was sixteen."
"Your great-grandfather, then. The one who built the house. The one who carved the newel post. The one who marked the trees."
Wendell said nothing.
"Wendell."
"I don't know, Caleb. I've been on this property since I was a boy. I've worked this land for thirty years. I've never opened that door. I've never been told there was a door. I've never been told not to open it. I've never been told anything about it at all, until this minute, standing here with you."
Caleb looked at the door for a long time. Then he looked back at Wendell.
"What do you want to do?"
Wendell looked at the door. The iron was the temperature of skin. The circles waited.
"I want to go back upstairs," he said. "I want to sit at my table. I want to drink a cup of coffee. I want to think about this."
"And then?"
"And then I'll decide."
They went back through the cold room. Wendell closed the door behind them and latched it, and the latch made a sound that was too final, the sound of a thing being put away. They went back through the main cellar. Wendell turned off the light at the bottom of the stairs. They climbed the wooden stairs, and this time he did not step over the third stair; he stepped on it, and it held him, and he did not know why it had ever given.
He closed the cellar door behind them and put the hook back on the nail. The kitchen was bright with the last of the afternoon light. The kettle was still on the stove where he had left it. The cups were still on the counter.
He filled the kettle. He lit the burner. He set out two cups.
Caleb was leaning against the doorframe that led to the hall, his arms folded, watching him.
"You're shaking," Caleb said.
"I'm not."
"Your hand, on the kettle."
Wendell looked at his hand. The hand was steady. He looked at Caleb.
"I'm fine," he said.
The water began to heat. The kettle ticked on the burner. Outside, the wind came up again and pressed against the house, and the house answered with a long, low sound, the sound of a structure settling into itself, the sound of a thing that had stood for a hundred and twenty years and intended to stand for a hundred more.
In the cellar below them, behind the iron door, in the dark that no light had ever reached, something that had been listening stopped listening, and something that had been waiting began, very slowly, to scratch at the stone again.
Wendell set the kettle on the burner and watched the blue flame catch. The gas hissed for a moment, then steadied into a clean ring of heat beneath the copper. He had not lit the stove in three weeks. There had been no reason. The weather had been warm, and the food he ate required no cooking, and the evenings had been long and bright enough to sit on the porch with a glass of water and watch the light leave the fields.
Now it was almost dark, and the stove was lit, and he was making tea for a man he had not seen in four years.
"I didn't know you were back," Wendell said. He did not turn around. He watched the flame. "Vivienne didn't say."
"Vivienne doesn't know." Caleb's voice came from the doorway, light and uninflected, the voice of a man who had learned to keep his sentences short. "I drove in from the east this morning. I've been at the motel out on 9 since yesterday."
"You could have called."
"I could have." A pause. "I didn't."
Wendell opened the cabinet above the sink. The tea was on the second shelf, in a tin his mother had painted with cornflowers in a year he could not remember. He opened the tin. The tea smelled of dust and something faintly floral, something that had been inside the tin for a long time and had taken on the tin's particular character.
"When did you get back to town?" Wendell asked.
"Yesterday afternoon. I stopped at the diner. Mae told me you'd been out to the north field with a backhoe two days ago."
Wendell set the tin on the counter. He took out two tea bags. He set them on the counter beside the tin.
"She talks," he said.
"Everyone talks. There's nothing else to do." Caleb shifted in the doorway. Wendell heard the faint scrape of his shoulder against the wood. "What were you digging for?"
Wendell did not answer for a moment. The kettle ticked. The flame hissed.
"I wasn't digging for anything," he said. "I was filling in the trench."
"The trench."
"The one by the back tree line. You'd know it if you saw it. It's been there since before I was born. Dad used to say it was an old foundation. I used to believe him."
"And now?"
Wendell set a hand on the kettle. The copper was warm. Not yet hot.
"Now I think it was a root cellar that got covered over. Or a well that caved. Or a place where someone buried something they didn't want found." He paused. "It doesn't matter. I filled it in. That's the end of it."
"It is not the end of it," Caleb said, and his voice had changed. The lightness was gone. What was underneath it was older and heavier and had been there for a long time, beneath the lightness, beneath the smoothness, beneath the years away. "Wendell. Look at me."
Wendell turned from the stove.
Caleb was still in the doorway. His arms were folded. His face was in shadow from the hall behind him, and Wendell could not read his expression. The kitchen light fell on him from the side and caught the line of his jaw, the corner of his mouth, the pale of one eye.
"You shouldn't have filled it in," Caleb said.
"It's my property."
"It's the Hollow Marsh property. There's a difference, and you know it. You have always known it." Caleb unfolded his arms. He put his hands in his pockets. "I used to laugh at that. You remember? When we were kids. You'd say it just like that. It's my property. As if the land could belong to anyone. As if the house could belong to anyone. As if the cellar could belong to anyone."
"The cellar is a hole in the ground."
"The cellar is not a hole in the ground." Caleb's voice was quiet, and the quietness was worse than shouting. "The cellar is the reason your father is in the home. The cellar is the reason Ezra is the way he is. The cellar is the reason Vivienne won't sleep past three in the morning. The cellar is the reason I left, Wendell, although you never asked me why, and I never told you, and we both pretended it was about something else."
Wendell turned back to the stove. The kettle was beginning to whisper. He watched the first small bubbles form along the seam of the copper.
"I didn't know you were back," he said again.
"You keep saying that. As if it changes anything." Caleb moved. Wendell heard his footstep on the kitchen floor, and then he stopped. He had not come all the way into the room. He had stopped at the edge of the linoleum, where the kitchen met the hall. "I'm not coming in."
"Why not?"
"Because I made a promise. A long time ago. To your father. To myself." Caleb's voice was steady. "I will not set foot in that house again. I will not cross the threshold. I will not go down to the cellar. I will not touch the iron door. I will not look at the thing behind the door, and I will not let it look at me. I made that promise and I have kept it, and I am keeping it now, standing here, with one foot on the rug and one foot on the linoleum, because I am not going to be the one who breaks it."
Wendell turned the burner off. The flame died. The kettle kept its heat.
"You're not making sense," he said.
"I am making perfect sense. You are the one who has forgotten how to hear it." Caleb was quiet for a moment. Outside, the wind pressed against the house. The kitchen light flickered, just once, and steadied. "What did you see down there?"
"Stone. Old tools. A jar of buttons. A newspaper from 1943."
"And what did you hear?"
Wendell did not answer.
"You heard it," Caleb said. "I can see it on you. You went down there, and you heard it, and now you are standing in your mother's kitchen making tea as if the sound of something breathing in a place where nothing should breathe is a thing that a man can set beside a kettle and walk away from."
"It's my property," Wendell said for the third time, and the words sounded thin to him even as he said them, the words of a man repeating a charm he had been taught as a child, a charm that had lost its power in a house that had forgotten to listen.
"It is not your property," Caleb said. "The land takes what it is owed. Your father knew that. Your grandfather knew that. The Marsh family has known that for a hundred and twenty years, and every one of them has known it, and every one of them has chosen to stay anyway, because the land is good land, and the house is a good house, and the price is paid in pieces, and the pieces are always the ones you cannot spare."
Wendell poured the water. The steam rose. He set the cups on the counter.
"You should sell," Caleb said. "You should put the house on the market in the spring. You should take Vivienne and go. You should go somewhere the ground is not listening. You should go before the first frost. You should go before it starts to ask you for the next thing."
"And if I don't?"
Caleb was quiet for a long time. The wind pressed. The house answered. Somewhere down the hall, a door moved on its hinges, just a little, just enough to let out a breath of air that was colder than the air in the kitchen, air that smelled of stone and old roots and the deep earth beneath the cellar floor.
"Then I will come to the funeral," Caleb said. "And I will stand at the edge of the hole they put you in. And I will not step into the cemetery. And I will not touch the coffin. And I will not go down into the ground. And I will keep the promise I made, because the promise is the only thing that has kept me out of that house for four years, and it is the only thing that will keep me out of the ground beside you."
Wendell lifted one of the cups. He held it in both hands. The heat came through the ceramic and into his palms.
"The tea is ready," he said.
"I can't come in."
"You can come in."
"I can't." Caleb stepped back. He was on the rug now, fully on the rug, in the hall, away from the kitchen. His face was in shadow. Wendell could not see his eyes. "I have to go. I told Vivienne I would stop by the house, but I didn't tell her I would come in. I didn't tell her I would cross the threshold. I will tell her I came by. I will tell her I spoke to you from the porch. I will not tell her what I told you, because what I told you is not a thing that should be said twice in a house that is already listening."
"Caleb."
"Drink your tea, Wendell. Lock the door tonight. Don't go down to the cellar. And when the first frost comes, and the ground begins to heave, and you hear it under the house, you call me. You don't call anyone else. You call me, and I will come, and I will stand out here, and I will tell you what to do."
He turned. He walked down the hall. Wendell heard his footsteps on the wood, and then on the porch, and then on the steps, and then on the gravel, and then the sound of a car door opening and closing, and then the sound of an engine turning over, and then the sound of tires on the drive, and then nothing, nothing at all, except the wind, and the house, and the kettle ticking as it cooled on the stove.
Wendell stood in the kitchen with the two cups of tea. The steam rose from them and faded into the air. He looked at the doorway where Caleb had been standing, and the doorway was empty, and the linoleum at its edge was clean, and the rug in the hall was flat, and there was no sign that anyone had ever been there at all.
He drank his tea. It was bitter. The tea had been in the tin too long.
He poured the other cup down the sink. He washed both cups. He set them on the counter to dry. He turned off the kitchen light. He walked through the hall to the front door and looked out through the screen.
The drive was empty. The fields were dark. The wind was coming from the north, and it carried with it the first faint edge of cold, the first promise of the frost that was coming, the frost that would come in its own time, the frost that would seal the house and the land and the cellar and the thing in the cellar into the long winter that was waiting for them all.
Wendell closed the door. He locked it. He put the chain on. He stood in the dark hallway and listened to the house settle around him, and the house sounded like a thing that was preparing to wait, the way a thing waits when it knows that what it is waiting for is already on its way.