He removed the old sashes and reglazed them on sawhorses in the yard.
He taught me how to guide a putty knife so the line came out clean.
The sixth Saturday, he hung doors.
The seventh, eighth, and ninth went into kitchen cabinets.
Plain face-frame cabinets.
Nothing fashionable.
Nothing expensive.
The kind that looked as though they belonged in an old farmhouse.
He asked Opal what color the originals had been.
“Cream,” she said.
Then, after thinking:
“With a green line.”
Ron painted that green line himself.
Quarter-inch brush.
Slow hand.
He would not allow anyone to sand the pantry door frame.
He masked the height marks carefully and varnished right up to their edges.
Judy began coming every Saturday after Ron’s first day.
She brought dinner in a roaster.
Then she brought her sewing machine.
Eventually she made curtains for nine windows.
On the fourth Saturday, she found me alone near the pump.
She took both my hands.
My thumbs were still healing.
“I picked that card.”
I looked at her.
“I know.”
“No. I mean I picked it.”
Her chin trembled.
“I stood in the drugstore fifteen minutes reading cards.”
I did not know what to say.
“I thought you’d keep that one.”
She looked toward the house.
“I thought it said exactly what we felt about you.”
“It probably did.”
“That’s the problem.”
Her grip tightened around my fingers.
“I never asked myself what it would feel like to open it at that table.”
She looked down.
“With everybody else holding twenty thousand dollars.”
Her eyes filled.
“I’m sorry, honey.”
I squeezed her hands.
“I did keep it.”
She looked up.
“You did?”
“It’s in a drawer.”
That was true.
I had never thrown it away.
Kim arrived on the sixth Saturday with her two boys.
They spent most of the day pulling old nails.
Jeff came on the eighth Saturday with a borrowed trencher and ran a new water line from the well.
Stacy painted the entire upstairs.
Nobody asked them.
I strongly suspected Opal had been using her telephone.
Those Saturdays changed Nate and his father in a way no conversation could have.
They did not suddenly begin discussing feelings.
They did not apologize every weekend.
They worked.
One held something while the other fastened it.
One measured.
The other cut.
They argued over level lines and cabinet gaps.
They handed each other tools.
Around the ninth Saturday, I walked around the side of the house carrying two glasses of iced tea.
Ron and Nate were fitting a cabinet against an old wall.
Their heads were bent close together.
“You’ve got to scribe it,” Ron said. “Wall isn’t straight.”
Nate held up the level.
“Not even close.”
Ron snorted.
“Your great-grandfather never owned a level.”
He ran his hand over the wall.
“Look at that. Man built by eye.”
Then he laughed.
I stopped walking.
Not because the joke was especially funny.
Because Ron was standing in that yard with his face turned directly toward the house.
And laughing.
On the eleventh Saturday, after the tools were packed, Ron took the carpenter’s pencil from behind his ear.
“Come here, Nathan.”
He led us into the pantry.
Then he positioned Nate against the door frame.
Nate looked embarrassed.
“What are you doing?”
“Stand straight.”
“I am standing straight.”
“You slouch.”
“I’m thirty-six.”
“That apparently hasn’t helped.”