He did not shout it. Vince does not shout. It came out flat and puzzled, the voice of a man who has come home and found the furniture moved.
Kurt came down off the stepladder, wiping his hands on a rag.
“Morning, sir,” he said. “Kurt Schmidt. That’s my brother, Joel. We have a lease with the owner.”
“The owner,” Vince said, “has been dead nine years.”
Nobody answered him. The wind sang a little in the door track.
Then Kenzie looked up from the workbench with a half-inch socket in her hand.
“Uncle Vince,” she said, “can I ask you something?”
He turned. His whole face changed, the way it does for that child.
“Sure, kiddo.”
“Kurt and Joel pay Grandma seven hundred dollars a month for their half.” She said it carefully, like a spelling word. “How much do you pay for yours?”
Vince opened his mouth.
He shut it.
I watched my brother stand there and look for the answer, and I watched him find it, and it was not an easy thing to watch.
“I don’t, honey,” he said. “I never have.”
“Oh,” Kenzie said. She thought about it. “Is that why Grandma’s car has to sleep outside?”
“Kenzie,” I said. “That’s enough, sweetheart.”
“No,” Vince said. “Let her.”
He walked over to the chalk line and stood with his boots on either side of it. He looked at the wagon. He looked at the old boat on its four flat tires, and the leaves in it, and the tarp tied over the corner of his camper with a bucket hanging underneath.
“Who put the tarp on?” he asked.
“I did, sir,” Kurt said. “I hope that’s all right. I didn’t go inside it and I didn’t move it. It was running water on the bench.”
“What bench?”
Nobody had to tell him. He was already walking.
He stood in front of Len’s workbench for a long time. He put his thumb on the split in the plank. He looked at the drawer drying against the wall, and at the tools on the towel, and at the ten-year-old on the bucket who was putting them away.
Then he reached past her and picked up Len’s level.
It was a four foot mahogany level with brass ends, and it had been leaning in the corner behind the vise, where the drip ran down the wall. The wood had gone gray along one edge. The glass in the middle vial was fogged from the inside.
“That’s his good one,” Vince said.
“It is.”
“I borrowed this to set the trusses. I borrowed it about six times after.” He turned it over. “He told me if I ever left it out in the weather he’d skin me.”
“I remember.”
“I would have skinned anybody who did this to it.”
“Somebody did do it,” I said.
I did not say it hard. I only said it, and it was the hardest thing I have ever said to him.
Sophia Rivers is an experienced News Content Editor with a sharp eye for detail and a passion for delivering accurate and engaging news stories. At TheArchivists, she specializes in curating, editing, and presenting news content that informs and resonates with a global audience.
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