Chapter 7
CHAPTER SEVEN
ETHAN
The quote takes longer than it should.
I'll be typing the flashing line item, and I'll think about the way she looked at the soffit — not at it, but through it, trying to understand the structure.
I'll be running the materials list, and I'll think about the chip on the handle of Elise's mug and how she held it like she was already taking care of something. Small, specific things. The kind that doesn’t fit on a quote spreadsheet.
It lasts three days.
Tuesday through Thursday, which is two days longer than it should.
She texts at 4:17 on Friday.
Delaney Hart
Quote received. Fair is maybe an understatement. I'm inclined to pay you more on principle.
Accurate is a better word than fair, I text back. The number covers the work and the materials. That's what a number should do.
My ex-husband had a contractor who charged us for two hours for a job he finished in forty minutes. He never looked at the invoice. I always looked at the invoice.
I think about my ex-husband. Past tense, stated plainly, in a sentence about numbers.
Most people don't
Most people probably should.
I confirmed the start date with Mags. Apparently, this is how scheduling works now.
Mags has strong opinions about scheduling.
She seems to have strong opinions about most things.
She's usually right.
That's what she says.
I'm standing on the Galveston site holding my phone, and I realize I've been smiling at it for approximately forty-five seconds without noticing.
I put my phone in my pocket and go back to work.
When I get home, I reread the thread once and then close it, which takes more deliberate action than it should.
Friday evening, Frank is in his chair by the window that looks out over my mother's garden — the same view he's had from that chair for thirty years — and his eyes go to it the way they always have, reading it the same way I read a job site.
He looks good tonight. The tremor is minimal, his voice is clear, and he has the alertness of a man who's been paying attention to the world through a window all day and has thoughts about what he's seen.
We talk about the Galveston job first, because that's the order we do things — business, then the rest. He asks precise questions because he always does, because he built houses for forty years and the details still interest him.
I answer them the way I always do completely, without simplifying, because he doesn't need or want me to.
"Elm Lane job," he says, when we've finished with Galveston. "Elise Holloway's place."
"Starting Monday."
"Good house." He shifts slightly in his chair. "She kept it well. Last couple years, she slowed down, but the bones were always right." He glances at me. "Granddaughter's moving in?"
"For a while."
"Elise talked about her," he says. "Delaney. Said she was sharp. Said she had a way of making herself invisible that she hoped she'd grow out of,” He looks back at the garden. "Elise was perceptive."
I think about a woman standing on a back porch watching me examine a garden wall, with the kind of focused attention that isn't invisible at all. That's not what invisible looks like. Whatever she was when Elise worried about her, that's not what she is now.
Or maybe it's what she's stopping being.
"She seems to be figuring things out," I say.
Frank nods. The quiet that follows is the comfortable kind — the kind that doesn't need filling. Outside, my mother's garden is going brown at the edges the way October gardens do, the good, structured way of something that'll come back right in spring.
"You know what the hardest part of this job is?" Frank says, after a while. He means construction. He always means construction, and then it turns out he means something else.
"What's that?"
"Knowing when to fix what's broken and when to leave it alone.
" He turns his head toward me slightly. "Broken doesn't always mean wrong.
Sometimes it means the mortar is curing.
You come in before it's set, you get the work right and the bond wrong.
" He looks back out the window. "Come in at the right moment, though, and what you do holds for fifty years. "
I don't say anything.
"How are those shear panels on the Galveston east wall?" he says.
"Addressed," I say. "Full rework. It'll hold."
"Good," he says. "That's good work."