Chapter 10
GIL
The builders' association does a dinner every fall, first Friday after Labor Day, out at the Elks lodge — chicken or the fish, cash bar, a hundred-some contractors in their one good shirt.
I'd gone twenty-two years. Stood at that podium three separate times as a past president.
If a man gets made anywhere, that's the room where I got made — Gil Sowder, self-made, pulled himself up, built it with these two hands.
I'd told that story in that room more times than I can count.
I'd never once told it right.
We hadn't signed yet. The terms were still moving back and forth between Fern's lawyer and Tully, her markups and their counters.
But the deal was real, and we both knew it was going to happen.
Standing in the coat room at the Elks in my good shirt, thinking about twenty-two years of that dinner, I decided I wasn't going to wait for the ink to start telling the truth in the room where I'd been lying the longest.
They do the introductions during dessert — everybody stands, says his name and his outfit, hi I'm so-and-so from such-and-such. Goes fast. Nobody really listens. It's a formality.
When it came around to me I stood up and put my hand on the back of Fern's chair.
She looked up at me, because this wasn't the plan and I hadn't warned her, and I didn't regret that, not even a little.
The springing was part of the payment. The harm had been public — twenty-two years of self-made said out loud in that exact room — and the correction had to be public too, or it wasn't the same currency.
"Gil Sowder," I said. "Sowder Roofing." That's usually where I sit down.
I didn't sit down.
"And most of you have heard me say, in this room, that I built that company myself.
I've said it from this podium. Some of you clapped.
" A few uncertain laughs, people not sure where I was going.
"I want to correct the record, because it's been wrong for twenty-two years, and I'm the one who's had it wrong.
" I kept my hand on her chair. "This is Fern Sowder.
My wife. And this month, she becomes my partner and co-owner — half the company, her name going on the papers.
" I felt her go still under my hand. "And she's the reason Sowder Roofing has never once, in twenty-two years, in a business that eats companies like ours for sport, missed a payroll.
Not in the crash. Not through the slow winters.
Not ever. Eleven crews have fed their families two decades on the back of the woman at this table, and every year I stood up in this room and took the credit for her work and called myself self-made.
I wasn't self-made. I was Fern-made. I just never wrote her name down.
I'm writing it down now, in front of all of you, because you're the people I lied to, so you're the ones who've got to hear it corrected. "
You could've heard a fork drop. Fern was looking at her plate, and her jaw was doing something, and I couldn't tell whether I'd done a wonderful thing or an awful one — and then Marge Petrocelli, who runs the drywall outfit and has never once in her life been quiet, started clapping.
Then the whole table. Then it wasn't just our table.
Fern didn't stand up and wave. That's not her.
She just lifted her chin and looked around the room, level, at all these people who'd known her as Gil's wife twenty years and were doing the arithmetic over again in front of her, and she let them.
Afterward men came up to me all night, and every one of them said some version of the same thing, low, a little ashamed: my wife does our books too.
Half the county, turned out, was running on an unpaid woman in a back office, and I'd said her name out loud, and it had landed on all of them at once.
One of them, Bill Hartauer — masonry, thirty years, and not a soft man; he fought me over a zoning thing once and we didn't speak for two years — caught my elbow by the bar and wouldn't quite look at me.
"My Sandra does our books," he said. "Since '89.
She's out in the car right now, matter of fact.
Didn't want to come in. Says these dinners are for the men.
" He worked his jaw. "Never once thought about it the way you just said it.
Never-missed-payroll. She's the reason we never— God.
" He let go of my elbow. "I'm going to go get her out of the car.
That's a stupid thing, her sitting out there.
I don't know why I let her sit in the car. "
He went and got Sandra out of the car. I watched him through the window — open the passenger door, say something, and her look up, surprised, the exact surprise I'd been watching cross my own face all fall, the surprise of a woman being asked to come inside after years of the car.
It wasn't just my marriage in that room anymore.
I'd said a thing out loud that a hundred men weren't going to be able to un-hear.
We drove home quiet. Once she put her hand on my leg, which she hadn't done in weeks, and took it back, and that told me we weren't fixed — just further along than we'd been at breakfast.
"You didn't warn me," she said, in the dark of the truck.
"I know. I'm sorry. I should've—" I stopped.
"No. I'm not sorry. That's the thing, Fern.
If I'd warned you, you'd have told me not to, because you'd have wanted to spare me the embarrassment of standing up in that room and taking it apart.
You'd have protected me from doing the right thing.
You've been protecting me from myself twenty-four years.
I didn't warn you because for once I didn't want to be protected out of it. "
She was quiet, watching the road come at us.
"That's the first time you've ever said no to my protecting," she said finally. "You just said no to it in a truck. Huh."
"Was it wrong?"
"No," she said. "It was the least wrong thing you've done since July. Don't let it go to your head."
A mile of dark road went by before she said the rest, quiet, like she'd been working it out. "You didn't spend me up there, Gil. You spent yourself. That's why it worked."
I kept my eyes on the road. She was right, and there wasn't anything to lay on top of right.
My phone rang as we pulled into the driveway. Eleven o'clock. My mother.
She's eighty, out at the assisted place on the highway, and she does not call at eleven at night, so my stomach dropped — I figured she'd fallen. I answered in the driveway with the engine off.
"Ma? You okay?"
"Barbara Petrocelli's daughter is in my building.
" My mother's voice, thin now, but the iron still under it.
"She was at your dinner. Called her mother, mother called her aunt, aunt's across the hall from me.
So I heard. Faster than anything, a phone tree in a small town.
" A pause. I could hear her oxygen. "You put your wife's name on the company. "
"I did, Ma."
"On the papers. Real. Not just said it."
"Papers get signed this month."
She was quiet a long moment, and I sat in the dark driveway with Fern beside me, neither of us getting out, both of us listening to my mother breathe.
"Your father," my mother said, "never once put my name on anything.
" Flat. Not sad. Way past sad, out the other side of it into just the fact.
"Forty years I kept his shop. Forty. And when he sold it, my name wasn't on a single piece of it.
I signed nothing at that closing because there was nothing with my name to sign.
Walked out of forty years with a purse and a casserole dish somebody'd returned.
" Her oxygen hissed. "Good for you, Gilly. Late. God, it's late. But good."
She hung up before I could say anything. Eighty years old and she still gets the last word by hanging up — a trick she must have learned somewhere, maybe in a back room, maybe off a lifetime of men who talked over her until the only sentence she owned was the one she ended.
Good for you, Gilly. Late. She'd called me Gilly, which she hadn't done since I was a boy on a stool doing homework next to the register.
I sat there thinking about that stool, and how she used to slide me a butterscotch when the store was slow, out of the jar she kept for the customers.
She gave me the customer treat because there was no employee treat — because she wasn't an employee.
She was the owner's wife who happened to run the store.
Forty years, and her whole answer to what I'd done was good, late, but good.
Not congratulations. Not I'm proud. She wasn't going to let me have it clean, and she was right not to.
I sat in the truck. Fern was watching me — she'd heard enough of it, the shape of it, my mother's voice is loud even thin.
"Gil," she said, careful. "What did your mother just say to you."
Twenty-four years, and I'd never told my wife the one thing that explained all of it. I'd buried it so deep I'd stopped feeling it under everything. It was time. Past time. Late, but.
"Come inside," I said. "I have to tell you something I should've told you a long time ago."