Part 2 – More Than Nails and Planks
I stood there with the screwdriver in my hand and the board waiting, like a question no one wanted to ask out loud. My shop smelled like the life I chose—oil, glue, wood, a hint of coffee burned into a thermos lid from years of long mornings.
A wasp drifted slow through the light and changed its mind and left. The clock kept its steady tick, like an old dog’s tail against the floor.
“Dad?” my daughter called from the doorway. “You about ready for that shelf?”
She’s forty now, a teacher. Grown kids have a way of looking like your past wearing a new face. She stepped in, ran a finger along the top of the workbench. Her wedding ring had a nick in it.
I remembered the day we built the arch for that church where she got married—pine soaked with August heat, the three of us hoisting the span while the pastor blessed the sweat on our brows.
Dale whistled Johnny Cash that afternoon and called my daughter “college girl” because she always had a book in her hands.
“Almost,” I said. The word sat there, heavy.
“You okay?” she asked. “You got that look.”
“Just thinking.” I turned the board with my thumb and saw the tiny waves in the grain. Trees keep their storms inside them. You can read their record with a knife if you know how. I drove the first screw. The brassy threads bit, tight and clean.
“Your Uncle Frank called,” she said. “Said he found a box of Dale’s things.”
My chest pinched. “Where?”
“In his garage. Old chalk line, some photos, a folded-up apron. He wanted to know if you wanted ‘em.”
I could see it. Dale’s chalk line was blue, not red, because he said red bled like the devil on pale trim. He always tied the line off with a fisherman’s knot even though he never fished. Said it held better, and he was right.
“I’ll go by later,” I said.
She stood close behind me, watching my hands the way she used to when she was little and I wouldn’t let her near the miter saw. On the wall over the bench, a phone charger blinked like a heartbeat.
A little rectangle of glass had become the way the world talks to itself. I’m not against phones. I just don’t understand why they made people forget how to look.
“School cut shop class this year,” she said. “Budget. They’re doing coding on tablets instead. The kids like it.”
“It’s good to learn,” I said, forcing the words out level. “But a person ought to also know what a square corner feels like in his palm. Or hers.”
She knew better than to argue. She kissed my cheek and said she’d be back with the screws for the brackets—more an excuse to give me time than a need.
I finished the shelf slow. Sanded the edges with the old block Dale made from a cutoff, the sandpaper held by thumbtacks. The paper tore and I used it anyway.
When I wiped the board with a rag damped in mineral spirits, the grain rose like a photograph developing in a tray.
I signed the underside where no one would see, my name and the year, the way I always did. Then I added Dale’s initials, and Frank’s. A house carries the names of the hands that made it, even if no one ever reads them.
On the way to Frank’s, I drove past the old lumberyard. It isn’t really a lumberyard anymore. Half the yard is prefab panels shrink-wrapped like loaves of bread. The office has a screen on the wall that tells you the day’s prices, blinking up and down like a fish you can’t land.
You don’t haggle with a man in a vest now; you click a button and an algorithm tells you what the wood is worth. It never asks what the work is worth.
Frank lives in a little ranch house we resheathed the winter after Dale died. He came out before I killed the engine, moving like a man who keeps a ledger in his joints. His hair is thinner, his jaw still stubborn.
He hugged me in that half-awkward way old men do, like it’s a job we’re not trained for but intend to do right.
“I found these,” he said, lifting the box. “Been in the corner since—well.” He didn’t finish.
We set the box on his tailgate. The afternoon was soft with the kind of heat that makes dogs sigh under porches.
He pulled out the chalk line, the apron with a smear of stain like a brown river across the pocket, a Polaroid of the three of us in front of a house that didn’t have a roof yet. In the picture, Dale’s grin broke his face clean in two.
“Remember this lady?” Frank asked, tapping the photo with a knuckle browned by sun. “Mrs. Connelly.”
“I was just thinking about her,” I said.
He nodded. “Her niece called me last week. Said the porch step’s loose. Asked if we know anybody who could fix it.”
“Folks know anybody,” I said. “They just don’t know if they can afford anybody.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I told her I know two old coots who work for coffee.”
We went the next morning. The house sits in a part of town the storm cut a notch in and the years kept widening. The magnolia out front is bigger now, leaves thick as leather. The porch paint had more story than color in it. The loose step wobbled like a tooth.
The niece—a woman in her fifties with hands that looked like she’d carried too many boxes up too many stairs—met us with a smile that had been used hard and still worked.
“I can pay you,” she said.
“You can make coffee,” Frank said. “Dark.”
We pulled the step, and it told us everything. Nails eaten up with rust, stringer cracked where the grain ran out, water stains creeping like maps along the underside.
Mrs. Connelly’s niece watched from the doorway, arms crossed in a way that meant keeping something in, not keeping us out.
“She passed last spring,” she said after a while. “At home. That’s what she wanted.”
I set the pry bar down. The boards had that smell old wood gets, like coins and rain. “She cooked for us once,” I said, without meaning to. “Fried chicken and biscuits, right there on the tailgate.”
The niece laughed. “She said y’all stood in the rain holding a plastic sheet over her stove until the new roof went on.”
“It was a good stove,” Frank said.
We sistered the stringer with a fresh length and cut back to clean grain. Screwed it tight with deck screws that will outlive all of us. Laid the step back, true and quiet. The niece brought coffee in two mismatched mugs. One had a lighthouse on it.
“Thank you,” she said. “It’s hard to find people who’ll come out for something small. The internet sends you a guy with a clipboard who wants a deposit and a contract.”
“Small things keep the big things standing,” I said, and heard Dale’s voice in mine.
When we finished, Frank touched the porch post with the back of his fingers, a habit he has—like a blessing, like checking for a fever. “She was good people,” he said.
The niece nodded at the house behind her. “She kept your picture on the fridge. The one with the three of you. Said y’all were her ‘storm angels.’”
We both looked at our boots because some kinds of gratitude feel too big for a man to hold straight on. Before we left, I asked if I could see the kitchen. I don’t know why. Maybe I needed to make sure our past work was still standing.
She led us in. The ceiling we patched was still tight, the seam invisible to anyone who hadn’t chased it with mud and hope. On the counter sat a wooden paper-towel holder.
I knew it before I knew it. Dale made those for half the ladies we helped, a little extra on Saturdays from shop scraps. A circle, a dowel, a base rubbed with oil till it drank its fill.
I put my hand on it. The wood felt warm, like it remembers.
