Scribe
The wall's a quarter inch out over seven feet. The drywall crew hung it fast and taped it faster and nobody put a level on the studs first. It leans into the room at the top like a man trying to hear something.
The Hallorans want a bookcase there. Floor to ceiling, paint-grade poplar, face frame, a scribe strip up the side so it meets the wall tight. I stand the end panel against the drywall and bring it plumb with two shims under the base. At the ceiling the gap is a quarter. At the floor it's nothing.
"You could caulk that," Deshawn says.
"You could."
He grins. He's twenty-two and he's been with me since April and he's good. He doesn't know how good yet, and I don't tell him, because once they know they stop checking.
I open the compass to the widest part of the gap and hand it to him. "Point on the wall. Pencil on the wood. Keep it level. Don't let it tip."
He runs it down from the ceiling in one pull. The line comes out on the poplar with every wave of the drywall in it, a long drunk line that looks wrong and isn't. He stands back and frowns at it.
"That's the wall," I say. "Cut to that."
He takes the panel out to the sawhorses in the garage. Jigsaw first, blade tilted back a couple degrees so only the face edge will touch. He stays proud of the line like I showed him. Then I give him the block plane and he takes it down to the pencil in long strokes, and the shavings come off white and curl up on the concrete. It smells like poplar, which smells like nothing much. We carry it back in and stand it up and push it home. It goes against the wall like it came with the house.
The wall still leans. Nobody will ever know that but him and me and the wall.
Upstairs the Hallorans are fighting about the stair treads. They've been fighting about the stair treads since August. She wants them natural, clear finish, the white oak showing. He wants what he calls the walnut one, which isn't walnut. It's a stain with a walnut name on the can.
"Adam," she calls down. "Settle it."
I go up. There are two sample boards on the landing, leaned against the rail, one pale and one brown. They both look at me.
"It's your house," I say.
"That's not settling it."
"Put both boards on the bottom tread. Look at them tonight with the lights you'll actually have on. Not in daylight. You don't live on these stairs in daylight."
Mr. Halloran looks at his wife. She looks at the boards. They both go quiet, which is as close as they come to agreeing. I go back down.
"You tell everybody that," Deshawn says.
"It works on everybody."
We set the case box on the base and square it up and start shooting the face frame on. Deshawn holds and I nail. He's quiet for a while, which isn't like him.
"You sleeping?" he says.
"Some."
"You look like my uncle when he was doing nights at the Steelcase plant. Like a guy who's awake on purpose."
"Hold it tighter at the top."
He holds it tighter at the top. I set the nail. He doesn't ask again. He's good that way too. His mother raised four boys in a two-bedroom on the southeast side, and he told me once that in that house you learned fast which questions got you an answer and which got you sent outside.
At noon I eat in the truck with the door open. Turkey on wheat and a thermos of coffee. The sun is out and the air is cold under it, the kind of October day where your back is warm and your hands aren't. The phone goes on the dash and it's Leah.
"The closing moved," she says. No hello. Leah hasn't said hello on the phone since she was sixteen. "November ninth. Their inspector put a screwdriver through the boathouse sill."
"How far."
"All the way, Adam. How far do screwdrivers go."
"I can sister it. Half a day."
"They want a letter from a licensed contractor."
"I'm licensed."
"From a licensed contractor who isn't the seller's brother." I can hear her kitchen. The dishwasher, a kid's cartoon, her knee brace creaking when she shifts. "So it's the ninth. Which is fine. Which is actually good, because now we can do Dad before, and not in some parking lot after closing."
"Do Dad."
"The ashes. November first. That Sunday. We take them out in the rowboat, you and me and Claire, and we do it off the point where he used to fish, and then we have dinner at the cottage like people. One last time in the place."
I pick a piece of turkey out of the sandwich and eat it.
"She's got her mother," I say.
"Her mom's in Traverse. That's on the way. Sort of." The cartoon gets louder and she yells at somebody to turn it down and it goes down. "She's family, Adam. Dad would've wanted her there."
"He didn't want anything. He's in a box."
"You're going up Sunday?"
"Sunday."
"I'll meet you. Eleven. Bring contractor bags, the big ones, and don't let me throw out anything of Mom's." She stops. When she starts again her voice is down lower. "Ask her. That's all I'm saying. Ask her for me."
"I'll see you Sunday," I say.
She hangs up on me, which is how Leah says goodbye.
I sit with the door open until the coffee is gone. A crew across the road is setting trusses on a house that looks like the Hallorans' house, and a crane swings them up one at a time, and a guy on the top plate walks out along the wall to catch each one. He doesn't look down. He's good at it.
At five I drive to Wealthy Street.
The place is over a vacuum repair shop. Mr. Dombrowski runs the shop and owns the building and stays open till six, and when I go up the side stairs I can hear an upright running in the back, somebody testing a belt. The stairwell smells like old carpet and motor. The door at the top sticks at the head jamb. I keep meaning to plane it. I haven't.
One room, a bathroom, a kitchen along one wall with a two-burner stove. The floors are fir, painted brown a long time ago and scuffed back to wood where people walked. There's one bulb on a pull chain in the middle of the ceiling. There's a radiator under the window that knocks when the boiler comes on downstairs, three knocks and a hiss, and then it's quiet, and then three more. There's a chair. I made it a few winters back out of cherry offcuts and never found the right place for it. It's in the right place now. That's the only thing I've brought.
I take the tape off my belt and measure the wall under the window. Eighty-one inches, corner to radiator. A queen frame is eighty and change with the rails. I write eighty-one on the back of my hand in pencil and look at it. Measuring a wall isn't anything. I measure walls all day. I measured three at the Hallorans' this morning and I'm not moving in there either.
I pull the chain and sit in the chair with my coat on.
The lease says six months. I signed it on my phone in the Hallorans' driveway at seven in the morning three weeks ago, with my thumb, standing next to the truck. It took less time than signing for a lumber delivery.
I take out my wallet and take out the list.
It's on the back of a receipt from the yard on Chicago Drive. Two-by-fours and a box of deck screws on one side. On the other side, in carpenter's pencil, in my writing, three words one under the other.
Go.
Tell.
Stay.
Five weeks I've carried it. Five weeks is long enough to frame a house and get it dried in. I've taken it out every day and read the three words and put it back, and none of them has gotten any shorter, and I haven't crossed any of them out. That's where it is. I don't do anything with it tonight either. I read it and the radiator knocks.
There's a coffee can in the boathouse at the cottage. I've opened it once.
Sunday Leah will be in the boathouse all day with contractor bags.
I fold the receipt on its crease and put it back behind my license and sit there until the vacuum downstairs shuts off and Dombrowski locks the front door and the building goes quiet around me. Then I go home.
Marsh is cooking when I come in. The radio's on the talk station, two guys in Chicago yelling about a parking contract, and she's got the chicken in the pan with lemons and she's going at it fast, the way she cooks, like it owes her money. Her work bag's on the floor by the door where she'll trip on it later. I pick it up to hang it on the hook. It's heavy. Meter, camera, binder, the scale cards. It's always heavy.
I put my keys in the dish.
The little brass key isn't in the dish. It wasn't there this morning either.
I go wash my hands.
At dinner she talks. She tells me about a basement in Kentwood, a sump pump, a dehumidifier with a log in it, gray mold coming up in the drywall like flowers. Rosettes, she calls them. She tells me how many days that takes. She tells me about the man's sister in Holland. She tells it well, the way she tells everything, but there's too much of it and it comes too fast, and her face is lit up bright like somebody turned her up a notch past where she runs. She doesn't eat much. She moves the chicken around.
"Monday, then," I say, when she's done.
"Monday."
"How's the cottage?" she says. "Did Leah call?"
"At lunch. Closing moved to the ninth. The buyers' inspector found a soft sill in the boathouse."
"Can you fix it?"
"They want somebody who isn't me to say I fixed it."
She laughs. It's a real laugh, short, and for a second she looks like herself. I don't tell her the rest of what Leah said. I don't tell her about the rowboat or the point or the first of November. Leah can ask her. Leah will. I eat my chicken and I watch my wife push hers around, and the thing Leah wants sits on the table between the salt and the lemons.
There's a hair stuck on her cheek. I reach over and move it with the side of my finger. She lets me.
After, I dry and she washes. That's how it goes in this house because she doesn't dry the pans, she just waves a towel at them. Halfway through I put my chin on the top of her head. She goes stiff under it for about a second. Then she doesn't. We stand there. The radio's selling gutter guards. She hands me the roasting pan over her shoulder and I dry it and hang it on its nail.
At ten-thirty I leave the hall light on and go up.
I don't sleep. I lie on my back and listen to the house. It's an old house. I sistered half the joists under this floor. I know the furnace, the fridge, the one pane in the front door that buzzes when a truck goes by.
At eleven-thirty-five she comes up the stairs and goes past our door to her office. A drawer. A lock turning, the small one. Then she comes back down the hall and down the stairs along the wall, on the side where the treads don't talk. I shimmed those treads. I know which ones.
The side door.
I get up and stand at the window without touching the curtain. The street's dark. Leaves in the gutters. She's in the driveway with no coat on, at the back door of the Subaru, bent in at the waist. I can't see her hands. She stays like that a while. Then she shuts it and gets in the driver's side and sits there, and her face comes up blue in the dark from the phone. She doesn't start the car. She sits six minutes by the clock on the dresser. Then the phone goes dark and she gets out.
I'm in bed on my back when she comes in. She gets in carefully. She lies on her side facing the wall.
At one I get up.
"Left the tape in the truck," I say to the dark. Nothing comes back.
I go down past the hall light and out the side door in my socks. The concrete is cold and wet. I open the truck and take the tape measure off the seat and clip it on my waistband, because I said I would. Then I crouch at the back of the truck and reach up under the rear bumper, left side, where the steel folds over, and run my fingers along the inside of the fold.
It's still there.
Black plastic, flat, about the size of a book of matches. I know its edges now. I leave it where it is and stand up and wipe my fingers on my jeans.
Upstairs she hasn't moved. The light from the street comes in around the curtain and lies across the bed and across her shoulder and part of her face. I lie down and look at her face for a while.
She's breathing like somebody asleep. Slow and even, in through the nose. It's good. It's almost right. I count them. I get to thirty-one before one comes in wrong, a little short, the way it does when somebody is listening to you listen to them.
I keep counting.