4. Marcus
MARCUS
By the end of the first week she had ruined my mornings, and she'd done it with coffee.
I come before light. Always have. The house tells the truth in the dark, no glare to flatter the rot, just the work and the smell of cut wood, and that hour used to be mine alone.
Now I crest the last switchback and her truck's already in the drive, the parlor window lit, and waiting on the tailgate of my own truck, set where I can't pretend not to see it, a travel mug of something she calls coffee.
"It's a dark roast," she told me the first morning, like that explained the taste. It did not explain the taste. It tasted like a campfire somebody had put out with more coffee. I drank it anyway, every morning since, and I have not worked out why.
She is never not there. I don't know when she sleeps.
Some mornings I come up and the lamp's already burning and she's hunched at the laptop with a blanket around her shoulders, wearing the look people get in front of numbers that won't add up no matter which way you push them.
She shuts it fast when she hears the truck and has the bright one on by the time I'm through the door.
I don't ask. A man who lives behind his own shut door learns to leave another one alone.
She talks the whole time. To the camera, to me, to the house, to herself. I've learned to let it run like water in another room. Most of it I leave alone. Some of it I can't, because she's right, and being right is the most aggravating thing she does.
The camera and I had reached terms. She could film the house, the work, her own face talking at it.
Not me. Not my hands, not without my say-so, which I didn't give.
She tested the line twice a day, swinging the lens around like she'd forgotten, and I'd turn my back, and she'd sigh and call me the most expensive B-roll in Colorado.
It was the closest thing we had to a routine, and I won't pretend the testing had started to wear on me the way it should have.
My hands have always been smarter than the rest of me.
They can read a board with a thumb, find the soft spot under good paint, set a blade to a hairline without measuring twice when there's nobody around to make me prove it.
Words I have to hunt for. Wood I just know.
Sully used to say a man's hands tell the truth his mouth is still working up the nerve to.
I didn't argue with him living, and I don't argue with him now.
Day three, she stood in the gutted dining room while I chased a bad joint, turned a slow circle, and said the morning light wanted to come in low from the east, that we should pull the boards off that window first, before anything, because a room finds out who it is in its best light and then you build toward that.
I'd had that window last on the list. She was right.
I pulled the boards that afternoon and the room woke up, and I didn't say so, and she knew I knew, and she let me keep my mouth shut, which was somehow worse than gloating.
It needled me worse than it should have.
I'd spent a few hard years learning to trust my own read on a thing and nobody else's, and I'd learned it the expensive way.
A stranger walking into my house and seeing it true on the first morning was a kind of talent I had no guard against. I've never trusted what I can't see coming.
"Admit it," she said, when the light came pouring in gold across the floor. "Just say, 'Piper, you were right.' Three words. I'll never raise it again."
"We're behind schedule." I reached for the next board.
"That's nowhere near the three words I wanted."
Later she crouched at my shoulder while I cut a Dutchman to patch a window casing, a profile no mill runs anymore, the kind of repair you match by hand or not at all.
For once she didn't narrate. She just watched, close enough that I could hear her not talking, which with her is its own kind of loud.
"How do you know where to cut?" she asked, quiet, when the patch dropped in clean and the seam went invisible.
"I don't. The wood does. I just listen till it tells me." It was more than I'd meant to give away. I felt her file it somewhere, the way she files everything, and I bent back to the casing before she could ask the next thing.
She didn't quite let it go. She never does. "You talk to it," she said, half to herself, watching my hands move. "The wood. The whole house." I didn't answer that. There wasn't a safe way to.
The dog was supposed to be on my side.
Dozer rides in the truck bed and has for years, ancient now, gray to the muzzle, three-legged, big as a coffee table and twice as hard to shift once he's decided to be furniture.
He does not like people. He especially does not like noise.
I have watched that dog get up and leave a room because a man laughed too loud in it.
The first morning, Piper crouched down and didn't reach for him, didn't coo, just kept on talking to her camera and let him be.
By the third morning he'd dragged himself over to lie in the shade of her tripod.
By the fifth he crossed the whole parlor on his three legs, set that boulder of a head down in her lap, and sighed like he'd finally made it home.
"Traitor," I told him. He didn't crack an eye.
"What's his name?" she asked, her hand sunk in his ruff.
"Dozer."
"Because he bulldozes through things?"
"Because he sleeps." I picked the chisel back up. "Don't feed him off your hand. He'll never give you a minute's peace again."
"Too late," she said, and the dog groaned like he agreed, and I understood I'd already lent out something I hadn't meant to.
At noon she split her sandwich with him without being asked, and he took it off her flat palm soft as a gentleman, the same animal who once relieved me of the corner of a roofing invoice and most of an afternoon's patience.
I told her again not to. She did it again.
Dozer held my eye the whole time he chewed, and I'd swear there was something smug in it.
I should have been put out, and I was, mostly.
But that dog hadn't laid his head in anyone's lap in the whole time I'd had him, and a part of me I keep the lid on was glad somebody had finally earned it, even if it had to be the loudest woman in three counties.
I cut the next board a hair short out of distraction and had to do it twice, which has not happened to me in years.
The staircase was the one thing I'd told her to leave alone.
Not the demo, not the parlor, not the dog.
The staircase. Sully cut every tread by hand and pegged it, and half of them had a century of neglect in them and needed sistering before they'd take a grown woman's weight.
I was doing them one at a time, in order.
The ones that weren't ready I'd flagged with blue painter's tape, and I'd spent more words than I like in a single go telling her so.
Nothing above the tape. Not her foot, not the dog, not the tripod.
The morning had gone easy up to then, which should have been the warning.
Easy is when a job turns careless. I had my head in a mortise and half an ear on her voice climbing somewhere behind me, telling the camera how the light dropped down the stairwell this time of day, and I let myself not look, because watching her had started to feel like a thing I'd answer for later.
She was filming the climb. Walking up backward with the camera held out in front of her like it could see the steps for her, talking the whole way about light and lines and the shot, her eyes on the little screen instead of her boots. She went up past the tape.
I heard it before I saw it. Old wood doesn't snap clean. It gives, a long tired groan and then a crack like a knuckle, and that sound had me moving before the rest of me got a vote.
The tread let go under her back foot. She pitched, the camera went flying, her arms shot out for a rail that was only half-bolted, and I was already there.
I don't remember the floor between us. I had her around the waist and hauled her in, and we both hit the newel post hard enough to rattle my teeth, the post taking the worst of it the way Sully built it to.
Then nothing moved. She was flat against my chest, both my arms locked around her, her heart slamming so hard I felt it through her jacket, quick and wild, knocking to get out. Mine wasn't far behind. Her face was tipped up close under mine, eyes wide, the breath caught halfway up her throat.
"You don't go anywhere I haven't checked.
" It came out rough and too low, with the wrong heat in it, because the thing under the anger wasn't anger.
I'd hauled her out of bad floor in this house once already, the day we met, and that time I'd caught her by the collar, more luck than anything.
This time my body had crossed the room before I gave it leave, and that frightened me worse than the stairs did.
My hands were shaking. I clocked it the way you clock a cut a half second before it starts to sting, far off, then not.
A man's hands don't shake over a near miss on a job site.
These shook because they'd known something a beat before I did, reached for it before I signed off, and I wasn't ready to learn what.
"Okay," she breathed. She didn't step back. "Noted. Nothing above the tape." Then the corner of her mouth tugged, because she can't help it, heart still going or not. "You can set me down. Unless this is a whole thing now."
I set her on her feet and let go like she'd come off a live saw, one clean motion, no follow-through, and put the staircase between us. "Tape's there for a reason." True, and cowardly, and the best I had in me.
She looked me over instead of herself, which was backward. "Your hand's bleeding."
It was. A splinter off the post had opened the side of my thumb, and I hadn't felt it go in. I put it in my mouth like a kid, which was somehow less foolish than letting her near it with the first-aid kit she was already digging for.
"It's nothing."
"It's blood, Marcus. That's the opposite of nothing." But she stopped when I stepped back, read me as fast as she reads everything, and let it drop. "Fine. Bleed, then. Stoic."
She bent, scooped the camera off the landing, and checked the screen with hands that weren't steady either. "Tell me it kept rolling."
It had. I didn't say so.
"It kept rolling." She breathed out, half a laugh in it. "Of course it did. The one time I'd have paid it to look the other way."
Which meant it had all of it. Whatever my face did when the tread went, whatever my hands gave away after, it was on her card now, waiting for her to scrub back through it tonight with those quick eyes that miss nothing.
"You all right." I made it land as a fact, not a question, because if I asked it soft I'd have to look at her to do it.
"I've been caught worse." She rubbed the shoulder that had taken the post and tried a grin that didn't quite arrive. "Usually by people who let me hit the floor first."
I didn't have anywhere to put that, so I put it nowhere.
She didn't push it, and that was the part I had no slot for.
A woman whose whole trade is turning moments into footage had just been handed her best one yet, and she set the camera face down on the workbench and went to make more of that terrible coffee, and left the moment lying there between us, unfilmed.
So I did the only thing left to a man caught on tape.
I went back to work and set about not looking at her.
Not when she asked for a level she didn't need.
Not when she aimed the lens my way and waited me out.
I kept my eyes on the grain, my hands full, my back half to her, and told myself it was the work.
It held until the afternoon, when the new stringer needed two sets of hands to set and there was nobody on the mountain to be the second set but her.
So we did it close, her on one end and me on the other, lifting on a three count.
For the length of that lift I had to look at her after all, read her hands and her balance and call the timing.
She met my eyes over the timber and didn't say one clever thing, which for her is practically a vow of silence.
We seated it. We stepped apart. Going back to keeping my eyes off her came harder than the timber had.
The trouble with not looking at someone all day on purpose is that it costs more than looking ever would.
By dark I'd built the not-looking so high and so careful that a woman who reads rooms for a living would need one pass through the footage to see it for what it was.
I drove down the grade knowing she'd watch it tonight, knowing what she'd find.
A man working that hard to keep his eyes off one thing is only ever pointing at it.
Dozer rode shotgun on the way down, which he never does, his head out the window into the cold and the dark, watching the house shrink in the side mirror like he'd left something up there.
I told him to settle. He didn't. Somewhere past the second switchback I caught myself checking the mirror too, for a lit window I had no business thinking about, and I made myself stop, and a mile after that I checked it again.