A seed-company calendar still hung in the kitchen, turned to a July six years in the past.
Wallpaper was peeling from the front-room walls in long strips.
The fuse box sat beside the cellar stairs.
Sixty amps for the entire house.
Nate unscrewed the first fuse.
Behind it was a penny.
He stared at it.
“Well,” he said. “That’s one way.”
Behind the plaster, the wiring was knob-and-tube. Cloth-covered wire ran through porcelain knobs buried inside walls almost a century old.
It was brittle enough to crack between your fingers.
Before Nate became a diesel mechanic, he had spent two years in an electrical program at vocational school.
He went to the county office, pulled a homeowner’s permit, and bought a new 200-amp panel with the first paycheck after the auction.
Then he rewired the house.
At night.
He would finish his regular shift at five, drive to the Miller place, eat whatever I packed in a cooler, put on his headlamp, and work until eleven.
There was no house power yet.
Only a temporary pole outside.
Room by room, he drilled through old oak studs that were true two-by-fours and hard enough to fight every bit.
He pulled new cable.
Stapled every run clean.
Labeled circuits.
Checked his work.
I never once saw him hurry a staple.
I stripped wallpaper.
Five layers in the front room.
Beneath the final layer, somebody decades earlier had written columns of numbers in pencil on bare plaster.
Maybe household sums.
Maybe feed costs.
Maybe nothing important.
But I left them there.
I pulled wallpaper until both thumbs split.
I wrapped tape around them, went to my diner shift, came back, and kept pulling.
I was still working both jobs.
Buying the property had taken almost everything we had.
Wire cost money.
The well pump cost money.
The septic man cost money.
The dumpster cost money.
One night in May, I sat on an overturned five-gallon bucket in what would eventually be our kitchen.
Just for one minute, I told myself.
I woke an hour later.
My cheek was pressed against the plaster wall.
Nate’s work jacket was draped over my shoulders.
He had not woken me.
Six feet away, he was still on the ladder.
His headlamp had been turned down so it would not shine in my face.
The county inspector came during the first week of June.
His name was Larry.
He was a quiet man with a flashlight who went through the whole house and probably said fewer than ten words.
At the end, he signed the inspection card and put it in the front window.
“Who did this?” he asked Nate.
“I did.”
Larry studied him.
“Hm.”
Then he said, “You want a job?”
The power company installed the meter that Friday.
Nate threw the main breaker.
I stood in the kitchen.
He nodded toward the switch.
I flipped it.
A single bare bulb came on above the place where our kitchen table would eventually sit.
I do not remember ever seeing a prettier light.
That same week, the telephone rang at my hospital desk.
“Emily. This is Opal.”
Opal was Nate’s grandmother.
Ron’s mother.
She was eighty-eight and lived alone in the senior apartments behind the Methodist church. She still did her own laundry and read the county newspaper from beginning to end every day using a magnifying glass.
Including the legal notices.
I had always been a little intimidated by Opal.
She was small, straight-backed, and not given to unnecessary conversation.
“Opal? Is everything okay?”
“The paper finally printed the trustee’s sales.”
My hand stopped over the keyboard.
“It says Schafer, Nathan and Emily, bought a house and two and three-tenths acres on the north road.”
I said nothing.
“Is that the Miller place?”
I looked around the billing office as if someone might be listening.
“Yes, ma’am.”
Another silence.
“We haven’t told anybody yet,” I added. “We wanted to get it fit to see first.”
She was quiet so long that I thought the call had dropped.
Then she said, “Come get me Sunday after church.”
“All right.”
“And don’t tell Ronald.”
I sat straighter.
“Opal, the house isn’t really safe for visitors yet. The porch is bad, and we still have plaster down—”
“I have walked on worse.”
Then she hung up.
On Sunday I parked outside the Methodist church at a quarter after eleven.
Opal came down the walk wearing a navy-blue dress and her good shoes. Her pocketbook hung from one wrist.