Those Saturdays did something to Nate and his father that I could never have done with any amount of talking.
They didn’t say much to each other. They just handed each other things.
Along about the ninth week, I came around the corner of the house with two glasses of iced tea.
And I found Ron showing Nate how to scribe a cabinet to a crooked wall. The two of them had their heads bent close together.
“Your great-grandfather never owned a level,” Ron was saying. “Look at this wall. The man built by eye.”
And he was laughing.
In that yard. With his face turned full toward the house.
On the eleventh Saturday, when all the tools were loaded back in his truck, Ron took the carpenter’s pencil from behind his ear.
He went into the pantry.
He stood my husband up against that door frame. And he made a new line above all the others.
Nate, 36 yrs, he wrote. And the year.
Then he handed the pencil to me.
And I stood Ron up against the door frame and marked him.
We gave notice at our rented duplex. We moved into the house the second week of October.
I gave my notice at the truck stop the same day.
Patty cried. She gave me a key to the pie case as a keepsake. I took it as the highest honor that establishment had to offer.
For Thanksgiving, we set the table in the little room off the kitchen.
It was the only room on the ground floor big enough once all the table leaves were in. And anyway, there was no question about it.
Seventeen people.
Kim’s boys at a card table. Jeff carving the turkey, because Ron said his hands were too tired. Which wasn’t true.
Rhubarb sauce on the table. Out of Judy’s freezer. From the patch beside the cistern, cut that June.
Opal sat at the head of the table. Nate carried her chair in himself.
She was wearing the navy dress.
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