Chapter 7
Saturday dawned hot and bright, the lake lying flat as hammered tin between the mountains, and by eight in the morning Hank had the front porch torn down to its bones.
He had known the floor was bad. He had not known how bad until he set a pry bar under the first board and it came up in his hand soft as wet cardboard, the joist beneath it gone dark and punky and smelling of slow rot.
That was the trouble with old houses. The damage always ran further under the surface than a person expected.
Indeed, that was the trouble with a good many things.
Two trucks turned in off the road inside a minute of each other, the way they always seemed to, as though his brothers coordinated their arrival for effect.
“There he is,” Reno called, swinging down out of the cab. He buckled a tool belt around his hips, low like a gunslinger. “The cover model, doing his own demolition. The magazine’s going to eat it up.”
“They’re photographing a gown,” Hank said flatly.
“A gown on your porch,” Reno retorted, “which currently looks like a shipwreck. Good thing we came to bail you out.”
Dillon came around the back of his truck more slowly, carrying a circular saw and a thermos. He surveyed the wreckage with a woodworker’s experienced eye. “Joists bad, too?” he asked.
“Two of them. Maybe three.”
“Mm,” Dillon said, which from him amounted to a whole paragraph. He set the thermos on the one stretch of railing still trustworthy enough to hold it and reached for his hand-held nail pry-bar.
They fell into the work without much being said, which was how the three of them usually worked.
Their granddad had taught them the same lessons on the same lumber and, after thirty years, they still reached for a board in the same order, passed the correct tool without being asked, and knew from the particular grunt a brother made whether he wanted the far end of a joist lifted or left alone.
Reno talked the whole while. He always did. And Dillon said about one word for every hundred of Reno’s. Hank ran somewhere in the middle, directing the work.
Hank measured and marked. Dillon cut because his cuts came off the saw square enough to set a level on. Reno carried and fastened. He also supplied, free of charge, a running commentary on everyone else’s technique.
It was the same division of labor they’d used as kids, and there was an ease in it Hank felt nowhere else on earth. His brothers knew him all the way down. They’d seen him at his lowest and worst and stayed anyway. He supposed that was the definition of being family.
“While we’re hauling this wood to the dump, we ought to throw this thing in too,” Reno said, nudging the aluminum porch chair with his boot. “Do the magazine a favor and toss it. Do the whole town a favor.”
“Leave the chair,” Hank said.
“Hank. It’s held together with one bolt and spite.”
“Leave it,” he said again, in the voice he’d used to end arguments since Reno was in diapers.
Reno scowled, but left the chair alone.
Reno was getting married in the fall. Dillon and Tessa hadn’t set a date yet, but Hank expected it would be soon. With both his brothers paired off and pointed at a future, he was the last single Steele, the odd man out with no one to walk down the aisle at Jenna and Sully’s wedding.
He’d made his peace with that. He told himself he had, anyway.
The doctorly voice in the back of his brain murmured that a doctor ought to know those were not the same thing.
“Grace wants to do the flowers herself for our wedding,” Reno said, driving a screw. “She’s already bargaining with a flower supplier in Bozeman over the order.”
“She’ll win,” Dillon said.
“No doubt,” Reno agreed. “She always win. People take one look at her and think she’s a soft, sweet pushover. Little do they know.” He added proudly, “She’s tough as nails under that fragile looking exterior.”
Dillon set down the saw and looked at Hank thoughtfully. “You know there’s no rule that says you have to stay single.”
Hank was startled. Where did that remark come from? Aloud he replied, “My life is pretty good already. I’ve got Madison and my medical practice. This house. I’ve got plenty.”
“Mm.” Dillon packed the single syllable with deep skepticism and picked the saw back up. He didn’t push Hank. None of them ever pushed each other.
But Dillon’s not-pushing today had a weight to it, the patience of a vet waiting out a stubborn animal that would come around on its own eventually.
They had the rotted joists out by noon and the new ones sistered in by two. As they started laying the new floorboards, the talk wandered around to the children, to the Carter horde tearing up the back yard, and then to Madison.
“She looks good,” Dillon said. “Like she’s starting to unwind from that tight knot she came to you all tied up in.”
Reno agreed. “She looks happier than I’ve ever seen her. Granted, that’s a pretty low bar.”
Hank said quietly, “She unpacked her boxes.”
Reno set the drill down and Dillon sat back on his heels. They both gazed off toward the sliver of lake glittering beyond the end of the street. Neither made eye contact with Hank, which was how the brothers usually said important and true things to each other.
Dillon nodded slowly. “I wasn’t sure we’d get to see that this soon.”
Reno asked, “Has she stopped carrying her backpack everywhere with her?”
And just like that, Hank was back in the courtroom, remembering how Madison had kept the backpack between her feet in the courtroom and reached down now and then to touch it as if reassuring herself it was still there.
He never did find out what all she had inside it. He assumed it was clothes and toiletry items for a short trip. Maybe a few of her most prized possessions. But she’d never told him what it held, and he respected her privacy enough not to look.
The smell of the Bozeman courthouse came back to him. Of floor wax and old radiators. Lorraine had worn a soft blue sweater and matching skirt that made her look demure and motherly, particularly when she sat with her hands folded and her chin tipped at a sorrowful, forgiving angle.
She’d kept up the act magnificently for the better part of an hour.
A mother who had stumbled and gotten well.
A mother who wanted only what was best for her beloved child.
She’d looked like the girl he’d married, and for a few minutes in that courtroom, he’d actually wondered if the threat of losing Madison had finally been dire enough to get her to straighten herself out for real.
And then, under Reno’s questioning, he’d watched the mask come off his ex-wife in real time. It had been terrible to watch. A microcosm of their whole, decade-long marriage playing out in just a few minutes.
Was that what their marriage had done to her? What he’d done to her? Had he really ruined her? Although it was hard for him to remember her the way she was in the beginning, seeing her composed and calm for a little while had been a stark reminder to him of who she’d once been.
Or had he ever really known her at all? Had that other ugly, self-destructive side of her been there all along? Had she just managed to hide it from him until the stress of her life with him became too much for her to maintain the facade any longer?
What had been too much for her? A husband who left her alone at home a lot while he worked long hours? The expectation by everyone around her, including him, that she would grow up and settle into adult responsibilities? Or was it the demands of parenthood that became too much for her?
Those were the three things she usually brought up when she screamed at him.
Lately though, he’d begun to wonder if there hadn’t been something else at the root of all her tirades and self-destructive behavior. He’d been reading up on addiction, and often the causes ran much deeper and much older than present-day stresses.
Still. The seven words she’d hissed at him after the hearing had seared their way into him and were branded on his heart, black and smoking, still painful every single day. You ruined my life. You ruined me.
“Hank.” Reno said even and low. “You’re a thousand miles off.”
He blinked and was back on the porch with the smell of fresh-cut pine and the saw cooling. His brothers were watching him in careful concern. The lake was still out there, though, flat and bright and entirely unconcerned.
“I was thinking about how things went sideways with Lorraine,” he admitted.
Dillon said with quiet conviction, “I’m just glad you got Madison away from her and have some time to do damage control before she’s all grown up.”
All three of them nodded soberly at that.
Reno picked the drill up, which was a mercy. “Anyway,” he said, lighter. “I’m glad to hear she unpacked.”
Through the front window, in his converted doctor’s office, Hank saw Sunny at the desk. She had the town’s ledgers stacked at her elbow, a pencil behind her ear, and another in her hand, and she was scowling at a column of figures as if she meant to make them tell the truth or die in the attempt.
She was so different from Lorraine. He didn’t know exactly what had happened to land Sunny as a single parent raising for young children and putting herself through an accounting degree while doing so, but she’d made the best of it and tried to build a good life for herself and her kids.
Lorraine had everything she could’ve asked for. A husband with a good job who supported her in fine style, a child, a husband who, although busy, doted on her. She’d thrown it all away and set out to make herself and everyone around her as miserable as possible.
The contrast flowed through him sharp and clean like cold water. He turned back to the porch floor quickly before either of his brothers could catch him doing the jaw thing again.
His brothers left at dusk with the porch repaired and ready to be re-stained. Hank had carried the aluminum chair back himself and set it down with a finality that had Reno laughing the whole way to his truck.
Sunny’s brood had gone home to Natalie’s bungalow, fed and damp and lightly sunburned from an afternoon in the sprinkler, and Madison had gone up to her room with a book and the tiredness of a girl who’d stopped pretending she was too old to have fun.
The house went quiet. Not the dead quiet it used to hold, but the settled, end-of-day quiet of a place that had been full and noisy and would be so again soon.
Hank found Sunny still at the desk, the town ledgers on one side of her and the photographs of the house’s original blueprints on the other, working back-and-forth between the two.
He set a cup of hot tea at her elbow, black, where she could reach it without looking, and she said thank you without looking. It was a small comfortable thing between them now, worn smooth by several weeks of repetition.
“You should go to bed,” she said. “You’ve been working on that porch since dawn.”
“So have you. Working at this deck, that is.”
She went back to her columns of numbers. He pulled out the chair across from her and went to work annotating patient files. She’d made him promise to catch up on all his paperwork at the end of every single week. No exceptions. It was the only way to avoid the return of the shoebox apocalypse.
For a while the only sounds were the scratch of her pencil and the old house creaking now and then.
Sunny studied one of the blueprints intently and commented, “Whoever drew this knew his stuff,” she said, half to herself. “Every measurement is precise, and the house matches it exactly. I can trust every single bit of it to be accurate. I love things I can trust.”
So did he. The problem with that was he’d found precious few things, or people, in this world that he could trust not to let him down.
He gathered that something in her life had gone badly wrong, based on the careful blank way she went when certain subjects came up.
There’d been a husband, past tense, and not a gentle past tense.
She’d clearly had money once, and then not.
And the disappearance of the money was tied to something uglier that she refused to talk about.
He didn’t ask.
He’d endured the prying, well-meant so what happened, exactly enough times to know it was the asker’s own curiosity wearing a costume of concern. Whatever had happened to her was hers. She would tell him about it when she was ready to, or she never would. Either way it was not a thing she owed him.
“The town’s books are worse than yours,” she said eventually. “I didn’t think anything could be worse than yours.”
“Thank you,” he replied dryly.
The corner of her mouth turned up. “Yours was just a mess. This,” she laid her hand on the town ledger, “is intentionally deceptive. Somebody made it confusing on purpose. A mess is innocent. This isn’t.”
“You can tell the confusion is intentional?”
“Absolutely.” Something crossed her face that almost looked like regret. “For a long time I told myself I just hadn’t looked hard enough. That if I’d only . . .” She stopped. “I’m good at this now because I was very bad at it once when it counted.”
He understood it for what it was. A door opened an inch, to see whether he would try to crash through.
He didn’t.
Instead, he said, “Funny thing about being bad at something when it counts. Folks act like you chose to be bad in that moment. Mostly, a thing just happened that you didn’t know how to stop.
I’ve got a mistake or two like that in my past. The voice in my head keeps telling me I should’ve known better.
I keep telling it I didn’t know enough back then to know better. ”
She was quiet a moment. “Does telling it you did your best at the time work?”
“Not even a little,” Hank said. “But I keep telling it that anyway. That’s all I can do.”
Her expression was surprised and held something careful in it that was coming unbraced.
Outside, past the new porch and the old aluminum chair, the lawn had gone silver under a half moon.
Sunny gathered the town’s lies into a neat stack and squared the blueprints of his honest old house on top of them, and neither of them said anything at all.
It was the good kind of quiet, though. The comfortable, companionable kind he hadn’t known he was starved for until Madi and then Sunny came and filled the house with it.