Chapter 4
WADE
Nine trucks. That's what June looks like from where I stand.
We open the gate at six, and by six-twenty there's a line of contractors' trailers out to the road with their engines running and Hoyt in the scale house with the clipboard and the loader already going.
Mulch moves first — black, brown, red. Every year I say we ought to quit carrying red and every year the red outsells the brown.
Then stone. Then the pallets of pavers some homeowner ordered on a Saturday because he watched a show.
May through September is the season. Everything that yard earns in a year it earns in those five months, and that's not a story I tell, that's the P and L. You could hold it up to a window.
I've been saying it's our season to my wife for twenty-nine years the way another man says I've got a bad back. True, and useful, and after a while you can't tell where the one ends.
The week after the whiteboard I didn't sleep right.
I don't sleep on my back and I slept on my back that whole week, listening to Gwen not sleeping either.
Four hundred and fifty-five hours. She'd done that in her head, standing at the table, while I was still talking.
First time I ever met her she added up a bar tab off a napkin faster than the register did.
So I fixed it. That's what I do — somebody hands me a problem, I find the part of it that's made out of materials and I solve that part.
First Saturday in June I was up at five, loaded the truck at the yard before we opened, and drove out to my mother's with nine hundred dollars of lumber and hardware on my own dime.
The ramp came first. I'd built the original one in a weekend the winter after Dad died, when Mom's knees went, and I'll admit I built it fast — the rise was a hair steep, the landing was small.
So I tore it off and did it right. One in twelve, thirty-six inch clear width, a five-by-five landing at the door so she can set the walker down before she works the handle.
Pressure treated, hot-dipped fasteners, rail height by code plus an inch, because she's tall for her generation.
Sunday I did the inside. Grab bars in three rooms, and that's the part people get wrong — they put one in the tub and figure they've done something.
Two in the bathroom, and every anchor into real wood, because a bar in drywall is a lie you hang on a wall.
But you need one in the hall by the step down to the den, because that step is where she'll go over.
And one in the bedroom by the closet, because she gets dressed standing up like it's 1971 and she won't be talked out of it.
Then the transfer pole by her chair. Then the porch rail, because the old one had been three balusters short since a storm two winters back and I'd been telling myself I'd get to it for two winters.
Day and a half, and I have never in my life enjoyed work more.
Sun on the back of my neck, sawdust in my arm hair, Mom out on the porch running her mouth about how I was making the place look like a hospital, me telling her she could have the hospital or the hospital bill, take her pick — and she laughed.
Actually laughed, first real one since April.
I put the last screw in at four on Sunday and sat down on the new landing with a warm bottle of water, and I felt like a man who had fixed it.
I brought Gwen out that evening. Told her it'd take ten minutes. I had the order of it in my head the way you have a route in your head: ramp, then the hall, then the bathroom.
She came up the ramp and stopped halfway and put her hand on the rail.
She's got a bookkeeper's way of looking at a thing — she doesn't scan, she reads.
She went down the whole rail. Checked the landing.
Went inside and stood in the hall and put her weight on the bar by the step, actually leaned on it, tested it with her body.
"It's good work," she said.
"One in twelve. The old one was closer to one in nine. She was fighting it every time."
"I know she was."
In the bathroom she looked at the tub bar, the toilet bar, the new non-slip strips on the tub floor. Turned the water on. Turned it off.
"She's set up now," I said. "Right? All of it's handled. It'll be way easier on you this summer."
I heard those last four words go out into the air of my mother's bathroom, and I watched my wife stop being angry, which was worse than anything.
She dried her hand on the towel — folded in thirds, the way Mom wants them, the way Gwen has folded them for twenty years without one word of thanks for it — and hung it back on the bar.
"Wade. How many hours did this take you?"
"Two days. Call it twenty, twenty-two with the drive."
"Twenty-two hours. And it's beautiful, I mean that. Somebody could look at that ramp in fifteen years and know a man who loved her built it."
"Okay."
"Every one of those hours was for the house."
The fan was going in the ceiling. She had her arms folded, not tight, just folded.
"Who's coming for the body?"
"What?"
"The body. Your mother's body." Level, the way she says everything, which is how I've gotten away with what I've gotten away with.
"A ramp doesn't get her off the toilet. A grab bar doesn't sort her pills or drive her to PT or check the incision or get a compression stocking onto a leg she can't bend.
A pole by the chair doesn't wash her hair. "
"We'll get somebody — " I started, and stopped. There was nobody. There wasn't even a phone number on a piece of paper.
"The body is the job," she said. "It's the whole job. It's the only part that's actually hard. And it's the job you gave me."
I looked at the tub bar. I'd set that one into the second stud from the corner and thought at the time it was the best anchor I'd ever placed.
"You renovated the place where I'm going to spend my summer, and then you told me it'd be easier on me."
She went out to the truck. I heard the ramp under her shoes, one in twelve, quiet.
I said I wanted to check my anchors before we left, which was true, technically. I do check anchors.
The house was doing what old houses do at seven in the evening, the settling, the refrigerator two rooms off. Mom had the television up too loud in the den. I put my palm on the tub bar and hauled down on it hard, all my weight, the way you're supposed to, and it didn't move a millimeter.
Then I stood up and I was in the doorway.
Just the doorway. Thirty-two inch opening, casing I helped Dad hang when I was nineteen, brass strike plate worn to nothing where the latch has hit it maybe forty thousand times.
Four inch tile inside it, white, the one chipped square in the corner by the vanity that's been chipped since I was in high school.
My hand was still up in the air where the bar had been.
It got loud in my ears — not sound, the other thing, the pressure you get coming up too fast off a dive.
My legs took the message before I did. I went through the hall, past the pole, out the front and down my own new ramp, and I didn't walk it like a man checking anchors.
I walked it like a man leaving a building.
Gwen was in the passenger seat with the window down, looking at her phone.
"All good?" she said, not really asking.
"Solid." My voice came out fine, the way it always does. "All of them are solid."
I backed out onto the road with my hands shaking on the wheel, and I put the radio on so she'd have something else to listen to.