"I didn't do anything. I just walked."
"That's not nothing." She looked at him. He could see her wanting to come in and sit on the bed, wanting to say things. He could see her deciding not to. "Grandpa called back. His phone was in the truck. He's — well. He wants to know if you'll come out to the barn tomorrow. Jordan's going to stay home with me. I took the day."
"Why me?"
"He didn't say. You know Grandpa." She almost smiled. "He said, 'Tell the stranger I've got work for him.'"
He thought about saying no. He thought about saying he had homework. The thing was, he didn't have any homework, and his mother knew it, and she knew that he knew it, and they both stood there for a second knowing it.
"Okay," he said.
* * *
Grandpa's truck pulled into the driveway at eight the next morning and honked once, long, because Grandpa did not believe in getting out of the truck. Caleb climbed into the cab, which smelled like coffee and dust and Big Red gum, and Grandpa looked at him for a second and then put it in reverse without saying anything, and they drove out of town on Route 9 with the radio on the AM station that played farm reports and old country songs in roughly equal measure.
The barn was cold inside. Grandpa turned on the kerosene heater, which ticked and stank and slowly began to glow orange, and turned on the big shop lights, which hummed and flickered and came up one bank at a time, and Caleb saw the back wall.
He remembered the back wall as a disaster. Two decades of Grandpa's coffee cans and cigar boxes and mismatched drawers, all of them full of every screw and nut and washer and cotter pin and spring Grandpa had ever taken out of anything, in no order at all, which was why it took Grandpa twenty minutes to find a quarter-inch bolt and why you could plunge your arm in up to the elbow.
It wasn't a disaster anymore.
It was a wall of clear plastic bins, dozens of them, maybe a hundred, on new metal shelving bolted to the studs. Every bin had a label. The labels were strips of masking tape, and on every strip, in black marker, in careful, crowded handwriting that Caleb knew better than his own, was what was inside. 1/4-20 HEX. 5/16 FLAT WASHER. #10 WOOD SCREW 1.5 IN. COTTER PINS (SMALL). COTTER PINS (MEDIUM). COTTER PINS (WEIRD). SPRINGS — DON'T KNOW WHAT THEY GO TO.
Caleb stood and looked at it for a long time. Grandpa let him.