15. The After Photograph
THE AFTER PHOTOGRAPH
MARNIE
The third week of July the lake was in full voice — boats all day, kids out on the raft off the place across the cove, somebody's stereo carrying over the water at four in the afternoon with nobody minding.
Asher took two days off and came up Thursday night with his tools in a milk crate.
"Teach me the windows," he said.
I told him I'd teach him one.
We did it Friday morning on the porch, on sawhorses, in the shade at the west end before the heat got up. I brought out the sash from the small upstairs room — the one that's been on my list two years because the bottom rail is checked — and put my kid in front of it with a putty knife.
"First thing, warm it in your hand. It's a mineral putty, there's linseed in it, so it works when it's warm and fights you when it's cold. Roll it into a rope."
He rolled it into a rope. He's got his father's hands, big ones, too much strength in them for this job at first.
"Now bed it. Push it into the corner with your thumb, all the way along. Don't be delicate. You want it in there against the glass with no air behind it, because air's what kills a glazing line. Water gets behind it and then you're into the rail."
He did about a foot and looked up. "How much of this house did you do like this?"
"All of it."
"No, but like?—"
"All of it, Ash. Thirty-one." I moved his thumb an inch. "Every sash in this building has been out on a horse in that yard with somebody's thumb in the corner, and up until this morning that thumb was always mine."
He worked another six inches.
"Okay. Now the knife. One pull. Set the angle first, then commit, then don't go back over it."
He went back over it.
"Don't fuss it."
"I fussed it."
"You fussed it. It shows. Do the next side."
The next side was good — one pull, clean bevel, the line breaking right at the sight line where it should. He sat back on his heels to look at it, and I got to watch a twenty-one-year-old electrician find out he'd just made something that will still be there when he's dead.
"Huh," he said.
"Yeah."
"That's — okay. Yeah." He wiped his knife on the rag, and then, not looking at me, in that offhand voice he uses for anything that matters: "You've got to show me the rest of them sometime. Keep it in the family, right?"
I had the putty tin in my hand, and I stood on my own porch holding it while my son said that.
Four words. I've had that sentence read at me by a lawyer, said at me across a kitchen table, quoted at me by cousins on a lawn. And my kid said it about a putty knife.
"Yeah," I said. "That's right."
"Don't make it weird."
"I'm not making it weird. Do the last side, you're losing the temperature on that putty."
He did the last side, and it was better than my fourth one ever was, which I did not tell him.
Dell came Saturday. He's eighty-one and doesn't drive past the county line anymore, so Glenn went and got him, which took most of the morning. He came up the flagstones slow with a hand on Glenn's forearm, stopped halfway, and looked down at the path.
"You do these dry?"
"Four inches of stone dust. Tamped in lifts."
"How many lifts?"
"Two."
"Good," he said. "Mortar'd have heaved by now. That'll still be flat when you're not here to hear about it."
He wanted the windows. Not the porch, not the plaster, not the kitchen. The sashes. So we did a lap — all the way around the outside first, slow, his hand on the clapboard, then inside, room by room, up the stairs a step at a time with both of us pretending he wasn't holding that rail hard.
He didn't say anything for the first eleven. At the twelfth, in the front room, he put his thumbnail into the putty line under the lower left pane and pressed.
"Hard through?"
"That's 2009."
"Mm."
He kept going, running his fingers along the meeting rails. Then he put his palm flat on the glass of the one over the sink — the first one, the one out of the trunk of the Corolla, the one he taught me on — and stood there long enough that Glenn looked over at me.
At the top of the stairs he checked a corner joint with his thumb, the way he did on his own bench in April, feeling for the give. There wasn't any.
We came back down and he sat on the porch step with a glass of water, out of breath, annoyed about being out of breath.
"Well," I said.
"Sound," he said. "All of it. Thirty-one for thirty-one, and I'd have bet money against you on four of them in 2011." He drank some water. "That's a hundred years of service in those, if nobody paints them shut. Tell your idiot cousins nobody paints them shut."
"Which four?"
"The two in the little room, the one on the stair, the one over the sink."
"That one was yours."
"That one was mine," he said. "I'd have bet against me too."
"I'll put it in the log."
"There's a log?"
"There's a log. It lives on the shelf in there now."
He grunted and looked out at the water a while. "Your fella brought me up here in his truck," he said. "Told me about the money on the way."
"He shouldn't have."
"He should've, it's a forty-minute drive." He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. "Fifteen years at his age. Yours too."
"I know what it is."
"Mm." He nodded slowly at the lake. "My father rented his whole life. Died in a rented room over a shoe store. So did his."
"You never told me that."
"You never asked me a thing that wasn't about windows." He set the glass down on the step. "Tell your county to come put you on your own register."
"That's not how it works."
"I know how it works. I'm eighty-one, not stupid." He handed me the glass. "Take me home, I'm no good after eleven."
Glenn drove him home after lunch, and it took the rest of the afternoon, because they stopped somewhere.
August is coming. Bridget's month, all thirty-one days of it, hers by my pen.
She'll be here with her own coffee maker and her opinions about the faucet, and she'll tell Rich for the rest of her life that she let us have this place.
Rich will believe her. Patrice will believe her, and in twenty years somebody's grandchild will say it at a table where I'm sitting.
When that happens I'm going to pass the potatoes.
I put the deed copy in the binder Sunday morning. It goes in the front — behind the 2006 page, not in front of it, and I stood there ten minutes with the rings open before I decided that.
So it runs: the four photographs from October 2006, the porch coming off the house, the bucket, my old station wagon with the hatch up, Start here in pencil.
Then a plastic sleeve with the recorded deed in it, county stamp in the corner, grantee line.
Then the use agreement behind that, all eight terms, his block capitals as the last exhibit. Then the log.
Then twenty years of everything in between, unchanged, in order, and that's where the two letters live now, in their sleeve, in date order, older on the left. I didn't burn them. I don't get to keep only the parts I like. The letters are what happened, so they stay.
I put it back on the shelf in the front room between the almanac and the placemats, where any kid in this family can pull it down and see who did what to this house.
Then I got the camera.
It's Sunday, the twentieth of July, ten past nine in the morning, and I'm setting a camera on the porch rail.
The light is good — early enough that the west end is still in shade, so the clapboards read, the shadow line under the porch deck reads, the piers show.
That's what I'm framing for. Same angle as the before, same corner, so the two can be held side by side and read in the same square of the world.
The before was shot from the bottom of the flagstones, from where my station wagon was parked, at about five feet. So that's where the camera goes: rail post, a folded shim under the left side to level it, which I've been doing with a shingle scrap since 2006.
Glenn's inside making coffee. Asher's asleep on the porch cot with one arm over his face. The lake is doing the flat morning thing it does before the boats.
I set the timer. Ten seconds.
Then I walk out across the flagstones I laid, sixty-two of them, dry-set, re-leveled twice. I turn around at the bottom and stand where I have stood behind a camera for twenty years — on the path, in front of the porch, in the frame.
The little light blinks, and then it blinks faster.
I put my hands down at my sides. I don't smile, particularly. I look straight into the lens, the way I do when I'm documenting a condition.
Ten. Nine.
There's the porch, re-set on its piers. There's the west corner that hung off this house like a broken jaw.
There's the plaster behind those walls and the roof deck over it, thirty-one sashes with my thumb in every corner of every one of them.
There's a green binder on the shelf inside with a stamped deed in the front of it that says my name first.
Three. Two.
And here I am, at fifty, in July, on the path.
In the record at last.
THE END
Writing this part is the hardest because I am still doing two books a week 6 months later - I love these stories and if you have been with me since the beginning - unless you are one of my reverse fan club members that gets EVERY book to 1 star it (I know you well now Sandra B!) - I guess you love them too - if there is something you want to say good or bad - let me know in the form of a review!
I really do read them all and consider what your feedback.
While you are waiting on the next - here are some things you might like…
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At the Thanksgiving story.
At the burned turkey.
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She told herself it was harmless.
Until her daughter starts telling it too.
The Job He Posted - Fern Sowder found the job posting at 8:40 on a Thursday night.
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Full-time. Salary. Benefits. Fifty-two thousand dollars a year.
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Beth knows he just proved the whole marriage.