Load
The tenon goes in with the heel of my hand or it doesn't go in. If it needs the mallet it's lying to you.
This one doesn't go in. I pull it and hold the cheek up to the window and find the shine where it's rubbed, a hair proud on the top edge, and take it down with the shoulder plane. Three strokes. Try it again. It slides home and sits, and I lay my palm flat on the joint and nothing moves.
White oak. Posts four by four, rails an inch and a half by six. I carried it up at four this morning, and two sawhorses, and I've been at it since five with hand tools only. Dombrowski's shop is right under me until six, and a man doesn't run a saw over another man's vacuums. The frame is for the wall under the window. Eighty-one inches, corner to radiator. The mattress has been on the floor there since Monday, and my back has opinions about it.
A frame is only as good as where the weight goes. The rails carry the mattress to the posts and the posts carry it to the floor, and the floor is old fir over joists I haven't seen. This morning I got down on my knees, put my ear to the boards and knocked along the line where the posts will stand. It rang.
I lay out the next mortise with the gauge. Knife the lines. Three-eighths chisel, bevel toward the waste, one tap of the mallet. Walk it out from the middle. The chips come up pale and smell like vinegar. Two inches deep. Pare the cheeks. Blow it out.
Downstairs the vacuum motor winds down and quits.
I hear him on the side stairs, one tread at a time. He hasn't been up here once since I signed. I set the chisel across the sawhorse and wait, and he comes to the open door and stands in it with his cardigan buttoned wrong.
"Voss."
"Mr. Dombrowski."
"Your wife came by."
The room is quiet. The radiator ticks, warming up for the night.
"Wednesday. Noon. Said she was measuring for curtains."
"Curtains."
"I let her up. Was that a problem?"
"No."
"She was up here twenty minutes." He looks at the ceiling like the number's written on it. "Tape came out once. At the end. I could hear it through the floor. One measurement."
"What'd she say?"
"That she was your wife. That you asked her." He lets that sit. "Wiped her feet. Nice manners. I'm only telling you. Nobody's been up here but you, and I told her that too."
"You did right."
"I didn't do anything. I gave her a key." He puts his hand on the frame. "Thirty-one years I've been married. My wife never once came to measure a window."
He goes down the way he came. The front door locks below me, and a minute later a car starts in the alley.
I stand there. Then I go around the room the way I'd go around a job after the tile crew leaves.
The chair has been turned a quarter, to face the room. I left it facing the glass. The jar of peanut butter has the knife standing in it, handle to the left. I left it right. The cabinet under the sink is shut and not latched. The blue sheets on the mattress have been sat on, once, at the edge, and smoothed. Somebody has been through this room slowly, looking at everything the way you look at something you might have to pay for.
I don't put any of it back.
I could have hidden it. The mattress fits in the truck. The lease could have gone in my wallet behind the license with the list. Dombrowski would have kept his mouth shut for twenty dollars. I did none of it. I put the lease in an email and the mattress under the window, and I left the door on a latch a child could work. You don't have to want a door open to leave it unlocked.
I go back to the mortise. I cut three more before nine. Then I put the tools in the roll and cover the wood with the drop cloth, and sit in the cherry chair, turned the way she left it, with my coat on.
The list is behind my license. I take it out. Go. Tell. Stay.
Six weeks I've had it. I read it. The radiator knocks three times and hisses. I put it back.
Leah calls at a quarter past nine. I pick up on the fourth ring, in the dark, with the bulb still off.
"She said yes," Leah says. "So you can stop making that face."
"I'm not making a face."
"I can hear it. Your jaw's doing the Dad thing." I hear a dish go into a rack. "I called her Sunday night and again Tuesday, because Sunday she said she'd think, and Tuesday she said yes. The first. She'll come up from her mother's."
"From Traverse."
"From wherever, Adam. She said yes."
"She say anything else?"
"She said she'd bring a coat." Another dish. "She sounded funny."
"Funny how."
"Careful. Like somebody reading off a card. Nobody's that careful about a meatloaf."
"She's careful."
"Is something going on with you two?"
"Nothing's going on."
"You'd tell me."
"Go to bed, Leah."
"I'm not the one who sounds like they're sitting in the dark," she says, and hangs up on me, and I am.
I sit with the phone until the screen goes dark. She said she'd bring a coat. I turn it over. It's a small thing to have said and Leah wouldn't have heard anything in it. I stand up and pull the chain, and the bulb comes on over the room, the sawhorses under their cloth and the mattress with its corner turned back and the bare window with the street in it. A bus goes by, lit up and empty. One measurement, Dombrowski said. I look at the window. Forty-one and a quarter across, I'd guess. I don't take the tape out to check.
Friday, at the Hallorans', Deshawn finds the first rail on the tailgate. I forgot I left it there.
"That's a bed rail."
"It is."
"That the white oak you wouldn't let me touch?"
"That's the oak."
He turns it over in his hands and runs his thumb down the tenon, and sights along the edge with one eye shut. He's good at that now. "This is nice work, boss." He holds it out. "Who's it for?"
"Me."
"For the house?"
"No."
He puts it back on the tailgate where he found it, square to the edge, and goes to see about the crown molding. He doesn't ask again. That's how I know it shows.
I leave at four and go straight home.
She's already there. The house smells like split pea, ham bone, the one from the freezer. Marsh is at the counter with the bread board and the long serrated knife and half a loaf from the bakery on Michigan Street. She's still in her work clothes, the good gray slacks. Her phone lies by the salt.
Something's gone out of her. Last Friday she was turned up a notch past where she runs. Tonight she's turned down, and she's taking a long time at the counter, laying each slice against the last in an even fan.
"Sit," she says. "It's ready."
I sit. She ladles it out and brings the bread, and takes her own chair across from me. She asks about the Hallorans and I tell her they picked the walnut, or the stain with the walnut name, and that he won and she's going to make him pay for it. She says of course she is. She asks whether the sill's coming along and I say Wednesday, if the post is good. It's all fine. It goes back and forth between us like a ball nobody's throwing hard. She doesn't eat. She picks up the knife again, though there's no bread left to cut but the end, and starts on that.
I worked it out in the truck. First the question. Then the other thing. You do the joint that matters first, before the day's worn you down, when your hands are still good.
I get two spoonfuls in. The soup's hot and salt and it stays in my mouth.
"Marsh."
"Mm."
"What was your sister like?"
It comes out easier than I thought. She told me once, on the third date, how her sister died, and I said I was sorry, and I have never asked her about her since. Not once in all the years. I have never let it get near the table.
She's slicing the end of the loaf. The knife goes through the crust and the crumb and touches the board, and comes back, and goes again. It doesn't stop. It doesn't slow. She doesn't look up.
"Funny," she says. "She drove too fast."
Slice.
"Why?"
"Leah's got me thinking about people."
"Mm."
She slices. I watch her hands. She works at her left thumb when she talks about anything that matters, the nail of the forefinger at the cuticle, over and over, until it bleeds. I've watched her do it through a funeral and a bad claim and her mother's diagnosis. The hands don't go there now. They don't do anything at all. They cut the bread and set each slice on the pile and reach for the next.
I put down my spoon.
"I rented a place," I say. "On Wealthy. I'm going to stay there a while."
The knife stops then. It stops halfway through the crust, and I watch her look at it, at the blade in the loaf, as if it belonged to somebody else. She lays it on the board. She sets it parallel to the edge.
"Is there someone?"
"No."
"Then why?"
"I can't be in this house right now."
It's true. Every word is true and I don't have to reach for one. I hold my hands still on the table. I want to see what she does with it.
She looks at me. Her face is clean of anything I could put a name to, and the light over the table is on her, and she looks like a wall somebody has decided to keep standing.
"Okay," she says.
That's all. She stands. She pushes in her chair, which she never does, and picks up her phone from beside the salt, and goes past me and out into the hall. I hear her on the stairs. I hear the office door.
I sit there. The soup skins over. Her bowl is full. Mine is half, and I eat the rest of it, all of it, because it's something to do with a spoon.
I do the dishes. I wash and then I dry, both, which takes twice as long and none of it comes out right. I have never washed her pans. She doesn't like the way I do it. I do them anyway, and hang each one on its nail, and wipe the counter down to the wood.
At twenty past eight she starts talking upstairs.
I can hear it through the ceiling. It's right over the kitchen, her office, and the house is old and I know every board of it. I can't make out words. I don't need words. It's the voice she uses on the phone for claims. Pleasant. Even. Unhurried. I've heard her use it on contractors who pad, and on a man who once tried to bill her for a roof he never put on, and she never raised it for either of them. She talks for a while and stops and listens and talks again. Once she laughs, short, the polite one.
I hang the towel over the oven door.
Then I go through the house.
I know where every switch is. I picked the spots myself, the second year, when the electrician opened the walls, one in every doorway a person might stand in, so nobody would have to cross a room in the dark to find one.
Dining room. Front room. The hall, both fixtures. The lamp on the piano we don't play. The bathroom under the stairs. The porch, front and back. I go up the cellar steps and turn on the one bulb down there, and leave the door to it open. I already left the kitchen on. When I'm done, every light on the first floor of the house is burning, and I go and sit in the middle of it at the kitchen table with my hands on the wood.
The ceiling is quiet. She's stopped.
At ten to twelve, from the foot of the stairs, I see the strip of light under her office door go out. I hear her cross the hall, and the bedroom door shut, quietly. I stand there in the hall with every lamp in the house lit behind me and look at the dark where the light was.
I leave them on. I go up.