5. Tara
TARA
The scaffold swayed a half inch when I shifted my weight, and I read the brick bond through my fingers before I put anything on paper.
Lombard Street. The hardship file Marisol had dropped on my desk had become my first scaffold assignment.
Third course from the cornice, the header course ran true to the corner and stopped. It picked up again two courses past it and ran level to the next window. Somebody had rebuilt that corner, and rebuilt it cheap.
The mortar belonged to a different decade than the brick, and the brick to a different century than the roofline. The developer’s engineer had written it all down as original.
Hand first, Danny’s order. I tapped the joints with a nail set and listened for the dead thud where the mortar had gone to sugar, scraped a sample with the edge of my probe, wrote it down.
The engineer’s letter said the house was past saving. The house said otherwise. My job was making the house’s argument in a hearing room.
After my years in New York, I’d forgotten how it felt to climb for a reason. Not the height. The why. The only ladder I’d touched in the Montgomery mansion was the library ladder in the sitting room.
Everything else I’d done at ground level, my hands clasped tightly in front of me. Things like reciting the mansion’s stairway portrait history to a donor group while Constance watched from a distance. A curator at an exhibit presenting itself. A docent in my own marriage.
The phone buzzed in my jacket’s chest pocket, and the vibration walked the survey book off the plank. I pinned it under my boot and fished the phone out. Declan’s name on the screen.
After two rings—the hesitation a person keeps for the call they should have made themselves—I answered.
“Hey, kiddo.”
Declan’s sawdust rasp sounded rougher over the phone. It put me in a kitchen with cracked linoleum, some hour either too late or too early, my brother coming through the door while I pretended I’d already eaten.
“Hey. Hang on.” I sat down on the plank, boots braced. “Okay.”
“You on a ladder?”
“Scaffold. Rowhouse survey.” Below me, traffic passed on Lombard.
“That’s my sister.”
I’d texted him from a rest stop the morning I drove out of New York.
Out. Safe. Will call when I’m settled.
He’d sent back a thumbs-up, which from Declan was a complete response.
Since then, we’d traded a dozen texts. The job, the neighborhood, a picture of my stove with its one working burner.
He’d called his work “some residential jobs” and left it there.
Texts weren’t talking, though, and we both knew it.
“Tell me you’re eating,” I said.
“I’m eating.”
“What’d you have for breakfast?”
A pause. “Toast.”
“Declan.”
“And beans.” Half a laugh down the line. “Christ. Now you know how it feels.”
“Then we’re even.”
The faucet ran in the background of his call, then stopped. “So. I’m back on the North Shore. Got a garage in Beverly, two bays. Work’s residential. Kitchens, porches, patching a newel out on Cabot Street. Steady enough.”
The Church Street contract had kept him in New York during the week. Back should have been good news.
But the word residential came with limitations. Underneath it, the big outfits had stopped returning his calls. Every commercial door he’d spent his working life earning had shut.
“It’s all my fault,” I said. “I found that opening on Church Street. I put your name in—”
“Stop.”
“If I hadn’t—”
“I took that job because it was a great opportunity.” Quiet, final, the voice that used to talk me down off the garage roof. “I don’t blame you for what happened, kiddo. That’s on the men running the project.”
It would have been easier if he’d yelled.
The memory came up anyway.
Dad died in early fall. I was eighteen, Declan twenty-one. The house was taken from us year after. The developer found the loophole before we found a lawyer, and by then my brother had become the only adult in the room.
He’d had a spot in a preservation program up north.
The program Dad had talked about since the week Declan could first hold a spokeshave steady.
He dropped out without discussing it, apprenticed with a friend of Dad’s, took double shifts to pay the bills.
Whatever money wasn’t spent on rent, groceries, and the truck went to my tuition, four years of it in payment installments.
I found his pay stubs when packing his boxes for one of our many moves. They were in a shoebox under the hall table, rubber-banded by month. Double shifts five days a week the rest of that fall. Six-day weeks in December, the month I’d asked for a winter coat and found one folded on my bed.
Before packing the box, I sat on the hallway floor and added it all up before putting everything away. He never knew I knew.
“You still there?” Declan asked.
“Yeah.” The word came out wet. I cleared my throat. “I’m glad about the garage, Declan.”
“It’s good.” A drawer opened on his end. “Neighbor kid comes around after school and sands boards. You’d like him. Doesn’t say much, works hard.”
“Wonder where he learned that?”
“Shut up.” His tone was warm.
I grinned up at the sky.
“Well, listen.” His voice found its no-nonsense register, the one he used for rot he couldn’t afford to fix. “Montgomery’s people called last week.”
The scaffold trembled. Or I did. “What people?”
“A lawyer out of the New York office. Wants a settlement. He said if I sign a confidential release and keep my mouth shut about the site, there’ll be a check.”
The cold started in the pit of my stomach and ran down both arms. “What did you tell him?”
“Told him to lose my number.” A cynical laugh. “I don’t sign papers that keep a lie in placer.”
“Declan—”
“It’s handled. Figured you’d want to know they’re still at it.” More sounds of moving around on his end. “You did the right by leaving.”
He’d called to tell me about the lawyer. Everything before it had been him working up to it.
“Email me the settlement offer,” I said. “I’ll have my lawyer take a look.”
“Will do,” he said, and ended the call.
I stayed on the plank a while longer, the wind coming off the roof and fluttering the survey page under my palm.
I’ll make it right later, quietly.
Thomas had said that between the soup and the fish, and this was what it looked like. A legal document with a check attached and my brother’s signature on a lie.
Leaving was the right thing.