Plumb
The table top is forty-two inches long and I've already glued it up twice.
The first time the boards cupped. The second time I did it right, growth rings alternating, clamps every eight inches, and now it sits across two sawhorses in the middle of the studio floor with the bulb swinging over it on its chain. White oak, quartersawn, out of a stack Hal Visser left me when he retired. I've been saving it for something. I don't ask what.
I take the plane down the length of it. The shaving comes off thin enough to read through. The radiator knocks three times and hisses and I keep the stroke going. White oak smells like tannin and old vinegar when it's fresh.
Two chairs will fit at forty-two. One would fit at thirty. I cut it at forty-two. I don't think about why.
The phone goes off on the windowsill. Leah. I let it ring four times and pick it up with the plane still in my other hand.
"Where are you?" she says.
"Shop."
"What's the knocking?"
"Furnace."
"That's not a furnace, that's a man with a hammer in a pipe." Something clatters on her end. A pot lid. A kid says something and she says, "Because I said, Owen." Then to me. "Listen. I called Claire."
I set the plane on the bench.
"About Sunday. She's coming from her mother's, so she can't be there before three. Which is fine. I told her the boat doesn't go in the water without me on the dock anyway, because of my knee, and because somebody has to be on land with a phone. She said she'd bring wine. I said we don't need wine, we're scattering our father. She said then she'd bring bread." Leah stops. "She's nice, Adam. I forget how nice. You should be nicer to her."
"I'm nice to her."
"You're polite to her. It's different." She sits down. Her chair creaks the way it always does. "The clocks go back Sunday, did you know that? Sun's down by twenty after five. So we do it at four. Not later. It's dark by six and I'm not standing on that dock in the dark with a bag of ashes and a bad knee."
"I'll get the rowboat in the water Friday," I say. "Check the oars. It'll have a foot of rain in it."
"Bail it."
"I'll bail it."
"I'm serious about the four o'clock." Then, lower, the way she does when she's stopped being the bossy one. "You know what I keep thinking about? He'd have loved it. Her coming. Dad asked about her every call. 'How's Claire.' Every single call. He never asked about my kids."
The bulb swings. My shadow goes long across the floor and short.
"Adam?"
"I'm here."
"Did he ever say why?"
"No."
"Twice he met her," Leah says. "Twice."
"He liked her."
"He didn't like anybody." She laughs, short. It isn't a laugh. "Fine. Four o'clock. Don't disappear on me. You did that in July and I did the whole funeral home by myself."
"I was at the shop."
"You were somewhere." She hangs up.
I stand there with the phone. Then I put it down on the sill and go back to the plane.
I work until the radiator quits. Then I brush the top off with my hand, which is how you check a surface, and I run my thumb over the edge where the new grain comes up. It's flat. It's true. It isn't done. I write Marsh a text with my thumb. At the shop. Late. I read it. It's the third one I've sent her this week that's a little bit of a lie. I send it.
I sit in the chair with my coat on and write the rest on the back of my hand in pencil, the way I would a cut list.
Tuesday.
Truck to the shop. Truck stays in the bay.
Take the van.
Road by six.
Back by two.
I look at it. It's short. I've made longer lists for a mantel.
Quarter to six on Godfrey Avenue is black and wet and nobody's up. I put the truck in the second bay and pull the door down behind it. The black square rides in there under the bumper. It'll sit in a locked bay till afternoon and tell her I'm at work.
I could pull it off. I don't. I stand in the dark bay with my hand on the tailgate a second. Then I go get the keys off the nail.
The van is Deshawn's, mostly. It smells like his body spray and the drive-through bag on the floor. His music is still in the deck, something with a lot of bass, and I turn it to nothing. I pull the seat back three notches. I put my thermos in the cup holder where there's already a cup. The mirror's set for a man a foot shorter than I am. I set it.
It starts on the second try. I let it warm. There's fog on the glass, and I wipe a hole in it with my sleeve and look out at the street through the hole.
I'm on the road by six.
At two the house has its workday quiet. The dryer ticks. Somewhere a clock. I leave the truck in the drive, nose in, where hers goes, and come in through the side door.
The dot'll show it. It's in my own drive. A man can come home.
I take the stairs on the wall side. The third one and the ninth don't talk if you stay left. I shimmed them myself, a Sunday, the second year. She thinks she found the quiet part on her own.
Her office is the back bedroom. It's got a desk and a lamp and a rolling chair, and the window that used to have a broken cord. Shelves of binders with dates on the spines. Two flashlights I can see without looking, one on the sill, one on the desk. The file cabinet is against the east wall, three drawers, gray, the kind you buy at an office store.
I stand in front of it.
The one she opened that night was the bottom. A drawer, then the small lock. I know the sound of a wafer lock, because every desk in America has one and none of them is any good.
The brass key's not in the dish. It hasn't been in eleven days.
I take the putty knife out of my back pocket. It's a two-inch, flexible, the one I use for glazing. I find the seam between the drawer face and the frame and work the blade in over the lock. There's a tongue in there. I feel for it. It's a quarter inch of steel and it doesn't want to move, and then it does. I lean on the blade. The drawer gives.
I slide it open.
Empty.
Gray steel, hanging rails, nothing on them. There's a rectangle on the bottom where the dust was pressed flat by something that sat there for years and isn't there now. Ten inches wide, fifteen long. A folder, the expanding kind. It left its shape behind like a boat leaves a stain on a lift.
I know where it went. I watched her put something in her car.
I crouch. I put my hand in and run it along the rails and the back panel. Then I stop.
Something is stuck to the back of the drawer. Taped at the corners, low, where you'd only see it with your head down in there. A photo.
I peel one corner of the tape. I turn my head to get the window light on it.
Two girls on a dock. Summer. The wood is bleached and there's a rope coiled on a cleat. The big one is ahead of the little one and half a step to the side, with her arm hooked behind the other's neck. Her hair is dark red, a red that doesn't happen on a head. She's laughing at whoever has the camera, or laughing at something just behind them. The little one has both hands in her pockets. She's squinting into the sun and her whole face has gone tight with it.
I put the corner of the tape back. I press it flat with my thumb, and again, and I check the rectangle of dust, and I put my hand where the folder was. I put it back exactly where it was.
I shut the drawer. I lean on it until the tongue clicks.
"Looking for something?"
She's in the doorway. She's in her work coat with her bag on her shoulder, and her keys are still in her hand. No engine. No side door. She came up the stairs on the wall side.
"A pencil," I say.
"Top drawer, left."
She doesn't move out of the doorway. I stand up. My knees crack. I'm holding the putty knife against my leg and I keep it there, flat, out of the light.
She looks at the file cabinet. Then at me. She looks at both for exactly the same length of time.
I cross to the desk. The top drawer, left, is a jumble. Rubber bands. A tape gun. A roll of stamps from before the price went up. I take a pencil out of it, a yellow one with an eraser, and I turn it over in my hand.
"You're home," she says.
"Halloran's waiting on paint. I came to get the drawings."
"They're in your truck."
"Right."
"The dot said the house." She says it easy. She says it like a receipt. "I came home to see what for."
"I came for a pencil."
She almost smiles. It doesn't get to her eyes and I don't think it's meant to. "You have a pencil," she says. She's looking at my shirt pocket, where the flat carpenter's pencil is riding where it always rides.
I put the yellow one in the pocket beside it.
"Two," I say.
"Dinner's at six."
She steps back out of the doorway to let me by. I go past her close, close enough to smell the day on her coat, the cold and the car heater and something wet like a basement. I don't look back. She watches me all the way down.
I finish the drawings at Halloran's. I put the trim up on the landing and it's a good day's work and I don't remember any of it.
She makes fish. We eat it. She says pass the salt. She doesn't say the word drawer and neither do I. She washes and I dry and when I hang the towel on the oven door she watches me fold it.
Eleven-forty by the clock on the dresser.
I lie on my back and count her breathing. Slow, in through the nose, the same as a week ago. I get to two hundred. She turns over at two hundred and four and I start again. I get to two hundred.
The key for the Subaru is on the hook inside the pantry door with the ones for the shed and the cottage. I get up and put my feet down on the floor. The floor is cold. I skip the third stair and the ninth, and I go through the kitchen in my socks without touching the switch. There's a streetlight on the maple and it comes in enough.
The side door. The step. The concrete is wet.
Her car sits behind my truck with the nose to the garage. I stand beside it a second. There are two things I could do. I could go around back and lift the hatch, and the light in there is as bright as a shop light and would show me to the whole street.
I open the rear door instead. I fold the seat. That's how she did it. I watched her from the window.
I get down on my knees on the back seat and reach through. My hand finds the carpet, the edge of the panel, the ring for lifting it. I lift. Under it, the jack, the tire, the lug wrench in its sleeve.
The green file is flat on top of the jack, where it was.
I take it out. It's heavier than I thought. The elastic is worn thin at the corner where a thumb has gone over it. There's a label in her handwriting, a rounder hand than she has now, three letters I don't read.
I carry it to the truck. I get in and pull the door to, not shut, and set it on my knees.
There's a claim form on top with my father's name in the box. A copy of something with a county stamp on it. A clipped column of newsprint gone soft at the fold. Photos, a lot of photos, loose. All of it in an order somebody chose. I don't touch any of it. I know what a file like this is made of. I don't want it in the cab with me longer than I need.
At the bottom is one sheet of yellow paper, legal size, folded once. Her handwriting on it, blue ink, not much. I lay it on the dash and fold back the crease. I put my phone over it. I take it twice, once in focus and once because I'm not sure the first one was.
I fold it on its crease. I put it back under the rest, the way it was, the elastic over the corner. I get out and shut the truck door with my hip so it doesn't slam. I put the file under the panel. Panel down. Seat up. I lock the car with the key and put my hand on the hood as I go by, out of habit, and it's cold.
I go back and sit in the truck with the door shut.
I read it on my phone with the dome light on. Then I turn the dome light off.