4. Jake
JAKE
Deacon has been my foreman for eleven years and my conscience for exactly none of them, which is why I should have known better than to mention her name.
We were up on the Whitfield job, second floor, framing out a bathroom wall that should have taken twenty minutes and had somehow eaten the better part of an hour because I kept measuring the same stud twice.
The house smelled like fresh-cut pine and generator exhaust, sawdust drifting gold through the window frame we hadn't glazed yet.
"That's the third time," Deacon said, not looking up from his own board. "Are you measuring the wood, or writing it a letter?"
"Making sure it's square."
"It's been square for forty minutes, Jake. It's squarer than my marriage."
I set the level down and let that one go, because arguing with Deacon about his marriage was a losing bet even on his good days, and today he had that look, the one that meant he'd already decided the conversation was heading somewhere and was just waiting for me to catch up.
"You seem distracted," he said.
"I'm not distracted."
"You've measured that stud three times and it's still crooked."
I looked. It was, in fact, still crooked. I swore under my breath and reset it, and Deacon had the decency not to say anything else until I'd nailed it in properly, though the decency didn't last.
"So," he said. "I heard somebody finally moved into the Mitchell place."
Something in my chest went tight, the way it did every time somebody said her name or the cottage's name or anything within three degrees of either one.
"Yeah."
"Heard it was a woman. Single mother, little girl, moved up from the city."
"That's the one."
"Heard," Deacon said, setting his nail gun down with the slow, deliberate patience of a man who had all day and intended to use it, "that you fixed her fence."
"I fixed the fence because the fence sits on my property line too. It wasn't a favor."
"Didn't say it was a favor. I said you fixed it."
I picked up another board and didn't answer, mostly because I knew from long experience that answering only fed him, and Deacon fed well.
"Carol says her name's Aria," he said.
And there it was. I corrected him before I could stop myself, the reflex of a man who apparently couldn't help himself even when silence was clearly the smarter play.
"It's Aria Mitchell. Aria, not Ariel."
Deacon grinned at me like I'd handed him a present he'd been asking for all year.
"I didn't say Ariel."
"You were about to."
"I was not about to say Ariel." He was absolutely about to say Ariel.
"But now that you mention it, you know her full name. Like you looked it up."
"She introduced herself. It's not a mystery, Deacon. It's basic manners."
"Basic manners," he repeated, testing the words like they tasted funny. "Sure. We'll call it that."
We worked another stretch in something close to silence, the good kind, the kind that came from years of not needing to fill every gap with words. Deacon whistled through his teeth while he worked, off tune, the same three notes over and over until I wanted to throw a stud at him.
I talked to Emily most days, somewhere in my head where nobody else could hear it. Not out loud, not anymore, not since the first year, when I'd caught myself doing it in front of Noah and scared us both quiet for a week.
It had started as bath time questions and never really stopped. Does he need stitches, or is he just being dramatic? Is this fever the kind you watch, or the kind you drive to a hospital for?
She always used to know, and some stubborn, useless part of me kept asking anyway, like asking hard enough might eventually earn an answer.
It never did. I asked regardless. Some habits outlive the person who taught them to you, and this one had outlived Emily by two years and counting, patient as a splinter that had worked in too deep to dig back out.
Around noon my phone buzzed on top of the toolbox. It was Carol.
Noah's day camp paperwork is due by the end of the week, she'd written. Did you fill out the emergency contact section, or do I need to handle that too?
I stared at the message longer than it deserved. Six boxes on a form, and I still hadn't decided who went in the second one, because the first had always been Emily and the second had never needed filling in until it did.
What do you think, I asked her anyway, the way I did most days without meaning to, the habit worn so deep into me it didn't feel strange anymore. Carol, probably. Or my mother.
You'd have an opinion about this and I don't have one at all.
She didn't answer, obviously. She never did. But some days I could still hear what she would have said, dry and a little exasperated, something close to just pick one, Jake.
It's a form, not a wedding.
I typed back that I'd fill it out tonight and put the phone away before Deacon could ask who I was scowling at.
He asked anyway.
"Everything alright?"
"It's day camp stuff. For Noah."
"Same one as last summer?"
"Yeah. Starts in a couple weeks."
Deacon nodded and let it sit there, which was its own kind of mercy, because he knew when a subject had teeth and when it didn't, and Noah's school forms had teeth I didn't feel like showing him today.
"Is he doing okay?" Deacon asked, quieter now, the teasing dropped for a second like it weighed too much to hold and joke at the same time. "Really okay?"
"He's talking to Lily. The new neighbor's girl." I heard myself say it before I'd decided whether I wanted to.
"First kid he's warmed up to since Emily."
Deacon didn't say anything clever to that, which from Deacon was practically a eulogy.
"That's good, Jake," he said instead. "That's real good."
"Yeah."
"Kid needs more of that."
"I know."
We let it sit a minute, the two of us up on a half framed wall in a house that wasn't mine, the kind of quiet that only worked between men who'd already said the hard things to each other once and didn't need to keep saying them.
"So," Deacon said, because apparently mercy had a time limit, "this Aria. Is she easy on the eyes?"
"I wasn't looking."
"Everybody's always looking, Jake. It's a proven fact. Ask any doctor."
"I don't think that's a real fact."
"It's proven enough for me." He picked up his nail gun again, sighting down a stud like it had personally offended him.
"Carol says she's got a good laugh. Loud. The kind that makes you look over even when you weren't planning to."
Something in me went very still, the same stillness that had hit me the first night I heard that laugh through her kitchen window, and I hoped to every god currently not listening to me that it didn't show on my face.
"Carol talks too much."
"Carol talks exactly the right amount. You just don't like what she's saying." Deacon fired three nails in quick succession, tap, tap, tap, and didn't look at me when he said the next part, which was somehow worse than if he had.
"You've been alone a long time, Jake."
"I'm not alone. I've got Noah."
"You know what I mean."
I did know what he meant, and I hated that I knew, and I hated more that some traitor part of me had been turning it over for five days now like a stone I couldn't put down.
"It's been two years," Deacon said, quieter still. "Nobody would blame you. Emily sure wouldn't."
I didn't answer that one, because there wasn't an answer that didn't cost more than I had to spend in the middle of an ordinary afternoon, and also because Deacon knew me well enough not to actually want an answer, just to have said the thing out loud so it existed somewhere outside my own head.
"You planning on saying something profound," I said, "or was that the whole speech?"
"That was the whole speech. I'm a foreman, not a therapist." He grinned, the moment already dissolving back into something easier to carry.
"Though for what it's worth, I'm cheaper too."
"I'll keep that in mind."
"You do that." He hefted another board onto the sawhorses. "Though if you want my professional opinion, free of charge, since I know how you love free things."
"I don't recall asking."
"You go fix one more thing on that woman's property, you're not fixing a fence anymore, Jake. You're courting. There's a difference, and pretty much everybody in this town already knows it except maybe you."
I didn't dignify that with an answer, which he took, correctly, as a kind of answer anyway.
"You know," Deacon said, "that fence project next door. Bit more thorough than the job needed."
"A job's a job."
"Sure it is. That's why you're out there squaring gates and measuring the same line twice." He shrugged, all innocence, which on Deacon looked like a man trying on a suit two sizes too small.
"Just an observation."
"Noted."
"I'm just saying, a man doesn't do that kind of work for a fence he doesn't care about."
"I care about all my fences equally."
"Course you do." He grinned, wide and unbothered, and went back to his board like he hadn't just landed the last word clean.
We finished the wall before the light started to go, and I sent the rest of the crew home while I stayed to sweep up, which was less about the sawdust and more about needing ten minutes where nobody was allowed to ask me questions I didn't have answers for.
Deacon lingered at the truck longer than he needed to.
"Hey," he said, before he climbed in.
"I'm messing with you. Mostly. But for what it's worth, it's good to see you thinking about something besides fence posts for once."
"I think about plenty of things."
"Name one that isn't Noah or a job site."
I couldn't, not fast enough to make it convincing, and Deacon laughed like I'd proven his whole point for him.
"Get some sleep, Hartley," he called through the window, already backing out. "And say hi to your neighbor for me. Purely professional, of course."
"Goodnight, Deacon."
"That's not a no."
He was gone before I could throw anything at the truck, which was probably for the best, since the only thing in reach was a level worth more than his opinion.
I drove home with the windows down, the evening warm and gold the way early summer evenings get right before they turn, radio off, just the tires on old asphalt and the smell of cut grass drifting in from somebody's yard.
I told myself I was thinking about the Whitfield job, about tomorrow's schedule, about anything that wasn't a laugh through a kitchen window or a hand held out for a handshake that had lasted a half second longer than it needed to.
I wasn't thinking about any of that.
I was thinking about the flashing on Rosalind's old roof, the kind that worked loose after a hard winter and let water find its way into places it had no business being, and how nobody had checked it in longer than anyone could say, not since she'd gotten too old to climb a ladder herself.
It wasn't my roof. It wasn't my problem. I had a truck full of tools and absolutely no reason that would hold up under questioning.
I told myself the roof really did need looking at. I did not tell myself the truth, which was that I would have found a reason regardless.