Chapter 4
GIL
I've fixed a lot of things. Roofs, mostly.
A marriage once too, early, when Bess was small and money was thin and Fern and I spent about six months being mean to each other — I fixed that by working more and saying less, or I told myself I did.
Show me the soft spot and I'll cut it out and put in new.
Fifty-six years old and I'd never met a leak I couldn't stop.
So Saturday morning, with Fern out on her knees in the flower beds not looking at me, I figured I'd found the soft spot and I knew how to cut it out.
I made coffee. She usually makes it. It had taken me most of the week to notice it wasn't getting made, and to work out that that was a thing she did every morning that I drank without thinking. I made it too strong and carried a mug out to her anyway.
She took it. Didn't say thank you. She had dirt to the wrist and a look on her I'd seen maybe twice in twenty-four years — once at her father's funeral.
"I've been thinking," I said.
"Okay."
"I'll take it down."
She looked up.
"The posting. I'll pull it today — right now, off my phone, standing here, if you want.
And the interviews, the whole thing, I'll cancel it.
Kayleen, the other one, all of it. We just forget it happened.
" I got down next to her, knees popping the way they do now.
"Everything goes back like it was. You keep the office, I keep my mouth shut, we never talk about it again. Deal?"
I thought it was a good offer. In my head I was being big about it — a man who'd gotten ahead of himself, admitting it, offering to undo it, no harm done, back to normal by lunch.
I figured she'd be relieved. Figured maybe she'd even laugh at me the way she does when I've made a mountain out of nothing, call me a soft old fool, and we'd be all right.
She set the mug down in the mulch, careful, the way she's careful with everything — the thing I married her for and the thing I'd quit seeing.
"Say the offer back to me," she said. "So I know I heard it right."
"I take down the posting. Everything goes back exactly like before."
"Like before." She wiped her wrists slow on her jeans.
"Gil. Like before is the problem. Like before is me running your company twenty-two years for nothing while you tell me we can't afford staff.
Like before is invisible. You're not offering to fix anything.
You're offering to put the wound back the way it was and call that peace. "
"I'm offering to give you your office back."
"It was never mine. That's what this week taught me — a thing you can hand back to me on any Saturday you feel like was never mine to begin with.
" She stood, and her knees popped too, and I noticed it, and I thought about how I never noticed.
"You can't un-post it, Gil. You can pull it off the website, sure.
But you can't pull it back out of my head.
I know what the job pays now. I know you sat down and figured out my number.
Fifty-two thousand dollars. I can't unknow that.
There's no back-to-before for a woman who's seen the price tag. "
"So what do you want." And I heard my own voice do the thing it does with a customer who won't take the fair fix — go flat, go a little hard. "You want me to grovel? Say sorry? I'll say sorry. Fern, I'm sorry. Is that it? What's the thing that makes this okay?"
"There isn't a thing you say." She picked up her trowel. "This isn't a sorry-shaped problem. Go to work, Gil. Delgado's still lapsing."
So I went to work. I sat in the truck in the driveway a minute first, and I didn't understand her, and I was angry — the kind of angry that's mostly scared and doesn't know it yet.
I'd offered to give it all back. Who turns down back-to-normal?
Some weeks I'd have crawled a mile for somebody to offer me back-to-normal.
It took me the whole drive into town to hear what she'd actually said, and even then just the edge of it.
Like before is the problem. I sat on it at the red light by the lumberyard.
In my trade, back-to-normal is the whole product — a roof fails, you put it back the way it was before the storm, that's what the customer's paying for.
I'd offered her that, and she'd looked at me like I'd offered to put the storm back.
The light went green. Somebody behind me leaned on the horn before I got my foot off the brake, and I couldn't have told him what I was chewing on, only that it had a shape and I couldn't get my hand around it. So I drove to the problem I could see.
The office was a wreck. Walking in was like walking into a body with the heart still warm and stopped.
Everything looked fine — the desk, the cabinet, the fan — and nothing moved.
Mago had left me three sticky notes. The county had left a voicemail, some tired woman reading me a permit number I couldn't match to anything I had.
Two men couldn't get paid because two forms weren't in a folder I couldn't find, in a cabinet where every drawer was labeled in Fern's handwriting.
One of them just said DON'T, and I stood in front of that one a long time and didn't open it, because some animal part of me knew my name was in there.
I found the W-9s eventually. Took me forty minutes. They were exactly where a sane person would keep them, which is how I knew Fern kept them there, and it made me feel like a stranger in a house I paid for.
While I was in there I tried to do one whole ordinary day of her job, just to prove I could.
Crew assignments, fine — that's mine, that's crew-boss, I can do it asleep.
Then Mago called about the Delgado permit, and I didn't know the county contact's name, didn't know we had a portal login, didn't know Renny the surveyor was already lined up because Fern had lined him up Thursday before she went quiet.
So I called Renny cold and re-ordered a stamp we already had coming — a hundred and fifty dollars I spent to un-know something she knew.
Then a lien waiver came in from a supplier and I looked at it and honestly couldn't tell you if it was the kind we file or the kind we sign or the kind we chase.
I set it on the desk. For all I know it's still there, and somewhere in that is a Purcell-sized lawsuit waiting if I set the wrong one down enough times.
By noon my stomach had gone sick and slow.
It wasn't that I couldn't learn her job.
I could learn it. It was that she wasn't doing a job.
She was the memory. There's no folder for the memory.
The folder tells you where the W-9 is. It doesn't tell you Renny's already coming, or that the Hoffman account pays on the tenth and not the first, or that you never let Mago start a tear-off before the change order's signed.
That lives in one head, and I'd married the head, and I'd been about to hire a stranger and hand her a filing cabinet like the cabinet was the job.
That night, late, after Fern went up — she'd started going up before me, which was new — I sat at the kitchen table with the reading glasses I hate and pulled the posting up on my laptop.
I hadn't looked at it since I wrote it. Wrote it fast, back in July, kind of proud of myself, figuring I'd caught the job pretty good for a man who's never done it.
I read it now the way you read something at midnight when the person it's about is upstairs, not talking to you.
Ideal candidate has extensive experience in construction office administration.
That was the first line, and I'd written it, and when I wrote it I'd been thinking about what I needed.
Now I read it and I wasn't thinking about what I needed.
I was thinking about who already had extensive experience in construction office administration — twenty-two years of it, more than anybody in the county, more than anybody I'd ever hire off a website.
And how I knew exactly where she was, which was in a bed in a house forty feet up the stairs.
And how I'd written a whole page hunting for her while she sat in the next chair.
It landed wrong in me, low and off to the left, like the first cold drop when a roof you swore was tight lets go over your head, and you look up, and you understand the leak was never where you'd been looking.
I shut the laptop. I didn't take the posting down. I told myself that was because she'd said not to bother, and that wasn't the whole reason, but I didn't have words yet for the rest of it.