PART 2 — You Can’t Download a Fire (Continued)
The morning after I told my son you can’t download a fire, I found myself on a collapsing porch with a hammer in my hand—while a little boy watched me like I was performing magic.
Not my grandson.
A different kid. A kid whose mom didn’t have the luxury of calling a contractor or waiting for “the system” to respond.
I drove home under a sky the color of dirty wool. The ice storm had moved east, but the roads still wore it like a bruise. My old pickup rattled the way it always does—honest noise, mechanical truth. No silent humming. No chirps. No touchscreens.
Just steel doing what steel was built to do.
When I pulled into my driveway, my shop sat behind the house like a faithful dog. The lights were off. The air smelled like cold pine and motor oil and time.
I stepped inside anyway.
A workshop doesn’t need permission to exist.
I flicked on the overhead bulbs and the place woke up: clamps on the wall, sawdust in the corners, a workbench scarred with forty years of repairs and stubborn choices. The kind of room that doesn’t pretend life is frictionless.
Then I heard it.
A long, tired groan of wood.
I walked to the front window.
My neighbor—Mara—was standing on her porch with her arms crossed tight against her chest, like she was trying to hold herself together. She was young. Maybe early thirties. The kind of young that’s already worn down around the eyes.
Her porch sagged in the middle like a bad knee.
And a little boy—eight, maybe—was poking the railing with a stick.
“Mornin’, Frank,” Mara called when she saw me.
Her voice tried to sound casual.
It failed.
“That porch been making that noise long?” I asked.
She blew out a breath like she’d been holding it for months. “Long enough that I started using the back door. But the back steps are… worse.”
The boy looked up at me like I was some kind of authority figure.
Kids still do that sometimes, when they haven’t been trained out of it.
“What’s your name?” I asked him.
“Jayden,” he said. Then, quieter: “Mom says I’m not supposed to jump out here anymore.”
“That’s smart,” I said, and he smiled like he’d just been complimented for breathing correctly.
Mara flinched. “I know I should’ve—”
“Don’t,” I cut in. Not harsh. Just firm. “You doing what you can.”
She swallowed. “I called three places. They’re booked. And it’s… expensive.”
I nodded like I’d known that answer before she said it.
Because I had.
I walked back into my shop, grabbed a flashlight, a pry bar, and a box of deck screws the size of my fist. I didn’t think about it. Thinking is what people do when they’re trying to talk themselves out of being decent.
When I stepped back out, Mara blinked. “Frank, I can’t—”
“You can,” I said. “You will. Later. If you want. Or you’ll pay somebody else twice as much after somebody gets hurt.”
Jayden’s eyes went wide. “Are you gonna fix it?”
I looked at him. Really looked.
The kid had dirty knees and a thin jacket zipped wrong and that hungry, hopeful patience kids get when adults keep disappointing them.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m gonna fix it.”
We crawled under the porch like it was a cave. The air under there was damp and smelled like rot—the kind of rot that starts small and ends big if you ignore it long enough.
Mara stood above us, wringing her hands. “Please be careful.”
“I’m 72,” I said. “Everything I do is careful.”
Jayden lay on his stomach and shined the flashlight where I pointed. He held it too close at first, blinding me.
“Whoa,” I said. “Back it up. Light’s not for showing me the problem. It’s for helping me see it.”
He adjusted, serious as a nurse.
I tapped the main beam with my knuckles. It sounded hollow.
“See that?” I told him. “Wood’s like people. If it stays wet too long, it starts giving up.”
Mara’s voice came down thin from above. “That’s… depressing.”
“It’s true,” I said. “But the good news is: people and porches both can be reinforced.”
I set the temporary jack posts, slow and steady. I worked the way I always have—measuring twice, listening to the material, not forcing what doesn’t want to move.
Jayden watched my hands like my grandson had watched them the night before.
Only Jayden leaned closer instead of backing away.
“What’s that?” he asked when I slid a new support under the beam.
“A sister,” I said.
He frowned. “It’s wood.”
“It’s a sister beam,” I explained. “You add support beside the weak part. You don’t shame the weak part. You don’t pretend it isn’t weak. You help it.”
Mara went quiet.
A lot of people go quiet when they realize you aren’t talking about wood anymore.
By noon, the porch was level again. The groan was gone. The steps felt solid under my boots.
Jayden stomped once, just to test it, and Mara snapped, “Jayden!”
I raised a hand. “It’s okay. Let him feel the difference.”
He stomped again, grinning. “It’s not scary now.”
Mara’s eyes got wet fast, like her feelings were tired of waiting their turn. “Thank you,” she said, and it came out ragged.
I wiped my hands on my jeans. “You got any lunch meat?”
She laughed through her nose. “I have peanut butter.”
“Perfect,” I said. “That’s fuel.”
We ate at her kitchen table—peanut butter sandwiches and cheap chips—and Jayden kept asking questions like his brain had finally found something it wanted to chew on.
“Why do screws have different heads?”
“How do you know what wood is strong?”
“Can you teach me to use a hammer?”
Mara watched him like she was seeing her own kid for the first time in a long time.
Then my phone rang.
It’s an old flip phone. It doesn’t do much. That’s why I like it.
The screen showed DAVID.
I stared at the name for a full two seconds before I answered.
“Dad,” my son said, and his voice sounded… tight. Like he was holding something back.
“Morning,” I said.
There was a pause long enough to hear his pride grinding its teeth.
“Leo threw up,” he blurted.
I blinked. “From what?”
“The VR thing. The… goggles. He got nauseous. He cried. Said his head felt ‘glitchy.’” David swallowed hard. “I didn’t know what to do.”
I looked at Mara’s kitchen. The clean counters. The worn linoleum. The human mess of living.
David’s house had been perfect.
And fragile.
“Ice storm spooked him,” I said.
“It spooked me,” David admitted, so quietly I almost missed it. “Dad, I—” He stopped. Restarted. “He asked about the fire. He asked if you could teach him.”
I didn’t let myself smile too fast. Hope is a tender thing. You can crush it by celebrating too loud.
“Can you?” David asked. “Can you… teach us? Both of us?”
There it was.
Not an apology.
Something harder.
A request.
“Saturday,” I said. “Bring him to my shop. No screens.”
David exhaled like I’d just told him he could put down a heavy bag. “Okay.”
Then he added, almost defensively, “I’m not trying to turn him into… I don’t know. Some kind of—”
“David,” I cut in, gentler than before. “I don’t care if he grows up to write code, paint houses, or go to the moon. I just want him to be able to live if the moon goes dark.”
Silence.
Then David said, “People are going to say this is dangerous.”
I almost laughed. Almost.
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