"He mentioned you were coming into town." Marcus rubbed the back of his neck in a let's-call-it-an-unsuttle way. "Oh God." Emily closed her eyes. "He didn't." "He very much did."
"I'm going to kill him." She said it with real affection. "He's been trying to marry me off since I turned 30. Every man he meets, the mailman, his cardiologist, a 22-year-old who came to fix the cable. He doesn't discriminate."
She shook her head. "I'm so sorry. Whatever he said to you, you can ignore it. You don't have to—" "He said I stopped when nobody was watching," Marcus said. Emily stopped.
The lightness dropped out of her expression, replaced by something more careful, more real. "He said that?" "Yeah." She looked at him differently then. Not the sizing-up look from before. Something quieter.
"That's a big thing for him to say about somebody," she said. "My dad doesn't hand those out." Before Marcus could answer, the back door banged open and Harold came out onto the porch with a box of nails in his hand and a grin already splitting his face. "Well, well, well," Harold said. "Look who changed his mind."
"I came to say hello," Marcus said. "That's all. I'm not staying." "Sure. Sure." Harold set the nails down and clapped his hands together, delighted, ignoring every word Marcus had just said.
"You two introduce yourselves." "We managed," Emily said dryly. "Dad, we need to talk about your definition of subtle." "I don't know what you're talking about." Harold's face was the picture of innocence.
He turned to Marcus. "Since you're here, and since you're a construction man, I don't suppose you'd take a look at this frame. Emily's doing her best, but she designs the pretty parts. The loadbearing parts, that's a different animal." "Excuse me," Emily said.
"I designed the pretty parts of a hospital last year. It's still standing." "The frame, Marcus," Harold said, steering him by the elbow toward the half-built structure and completely running over his daughter's objection. "Just tell me it won't fall on my head." And that was how Marcus Johnson, who had come to stay 15 minutes, ended up spending the entire afternoon.
I didn't mean to. He kept meaning to leave. But the frame did have a problem. Two of the corner joints were going to fail under a real roof load, and Marcus couldn't, in good conscience, walk away and let a 75-year-old man build something that might come down on him. So he took off his jacket.
And then he was up on the step stool showing Emily how to sister a second board onto the joint for strength. And she was arguing with him about it. And he was realizing she wasn't arguing to be difficult, but because she actually understood the physics and had a point. And somewhere in the back and forth, the afternoon just got away from all of them. "You're holding the level wrong," Emily said.
"I've been holding a level for 20 years." "Then you've been holding it wrong for 20 years." She reached over and turned his hand a/4 in. "There. Now read it."
Marcus looked at the bubble. It had shifted. She was right. He hated that she was right. "That's a rounding error," he said.
"That's the difference between a door that closes and a door that sticks for the next 40 years," Emily said. "My mother's garden house is not going to have a door that sticks." And just like that, the joking stopped because there was that word again, mothers. Marcus lowered the level. "Your dad told me about her. I'm sorry."
Emily was quiet for a moment, running her thumb along the edge of the board. "She wanted this so badly," she said. "For years. And he kept saying he'd build it. He's an engineer."
"He could have built it in a weekend if he'd wanted to, but there was always something. Work, then retirement, then his knees, and then she got sick, and then she stopped." And now he's out here every single day trying to finish it 3 years too late. "Like if he gets it right, it somehow makes up for all the years he didn't." "It doesn't work like that," Marcus said quietly.
"No," Emily said. "It doesn't, but he has to build it anyway." Emily looked at him. "Yeah," she said. And there was something surprised in her voice, like he'd said the thing she'd been trying to say for weeks.
"Yeah, he does." They worked in silence for a while after that. But it wasn't an awkward silence. It was the other kind. The kind that only happens between two people who've each carried something heavy and can recognize the weight of it on somebody else.
Around 2:00, Harold announced he was making sandwiches and disappeared inside. And Marcus was fairly sure the man was faking his sudden hunger just to leave the two of them alone. He wasn't even subtle about it. He practically winked on his way through the door. "He's not slick," Marcus said, watching him go.
"He thinks he's the sickest man alive," Emily said. "It's honestly kind of adorable." She sat down on the edge of the frame, wiping sweat from her forehead, and looked at Marcus. "So, since he's clearly going to interrogate us both later, tell me something real about yourself, Marcus Johnson. Not the version he's going to make up."
Marcus sat down a few feet away. "Not much to tell. I'm a construction supervisor. I've got a daughter, Ava. She's nine, and she's smarter than me, and she keeps track of my face."
"Keeps track of your face?" "She can tell when I'm thinking too hard. Says I get a wrinkle." Marcus touched the spot between his eyebrows, and Emily's eyes followed the gesture, and she almost smiled. "She caught me this morning. That's actually why I'm here.
"She called me out." "A 9-year-old talked you into coming?" "A 90-year-old told me being scared isn't a good enough reason not to do something," Marcus said, "which is a thing I told her once." So he shrugged. "Hard to argue with your own advice coming out of your kid's mouth."