The gate he'd save for Saturday. He'd need to come back anyway for the anchor bracket, and he'd rather do it right in good light than rush it at dusk. He was reaching for the first new slat when the back door opened. And Margaret came out carrying a plate, not drinks this time. An actual plate with a sandwich on it and a small pile of potato chips beside it, kettlecooked from a real bag, not the single serve kind.
He stayed where he was. She crossed the grass toward him and he noticed she'd changed her shoes. Slippers were gone, replaced with something low and canvas that said she'd decided to be outside for real. "You didn't eat lunch," she said. "I was going to grab something on the store run.
You went on the store run two hours ago. She held the plate out. Turkey on bread that had been cut from a real loaf. Maya's awake. She ate half a sleeve of crackers and went back to sleep.
Fevers down. He took the plate. He didn't argue about it. Thank you. Don't thank me.
Eat before it gets cold. She turned and looked at the new posts. The fresh slats going up. She had her arms crossed but looser than before. Like she'd settled into something.
It looks different already. It'll weather in, he said, sitting on an overturned bucket. Give it a season and you won't be able to tell the new from the old. I don't mean bad, different. She was quiet for a moment, looking at the fence line.
Richard kept saying he was going to fix it. Every spring for 4 years running, he'd walk out here in April. Look at it. Say, "This is the year." A pause. He was good at a great many things.
Carpentry was not among them. Daniel ate and said nothing. He knew from Brittany that Richard had been an architect. There was a particular irony in that. A man who drew loadbearing structures for other people's buildings and couldn't keep his own fence plum.
He liked Richard, quiet, dry, the kind of man who let a conversation find its own speed instead of pushing it. He would have liked knowing someone was actually doing it. Margaret said not to Daniel specifically, more to the yard, to the posts, to something she was working out in her own head. Then she turned and went back inside and he finished the sandwich and got back to work. He was reinforcing the fourth section, driving screws through a sisterboard along the inside of a weathered slat when he heard Mia's voice through the study window.
It was cracked an inch at the bottom in the afternoon had gone still enough that sound carried. Do you have kids, Maya? The scratchy, slowed down version of her voice she had when she was sick. A pause. Then, Margaret.
I have two, a son and a daughter. Where do they live? My son lives in Atlanta. My daughter is moving to Portland soon. Is Portland far?
Fairly far. Yes. He could hear Maya working through this. The way she did, taking her time with things, chewing on information before she swallowed it. He kept his drill running low, barely pressing so the sound wouldn't cover them.
Do you miss them? My asked. The pause was three full seconds. Long enough to mean something. Yes, Margaret said.
No qualification, no cushioning. I do. My mom lives far away, too. Maya said, "I don't really miss her that much anymore." "Is that bad?" Daniel's hand tightened on the drill. "Not pressing, just holding." "No," Margaret said.
She said it the way you said a thing when you'd thought it through before, and the answer was already waiting. Not the upward tilted no of someone managing a child, but the flat solid no of someone telling the truth. "That's not bad. That's just what happens when enough time goes by. Okay," Maya said.
And apparently that was settled because the television sound came back up. He went back to the screws. He focused on the wood and the angle and the resistance as the threads caught. He did not let himself think about his 8-year-old asking a near stranger whether it was acceptable to have mostly made peace with an absence. And he did not think about the near stranger answering without flinching or refraraming or making it about something easier.
He just drove screws and moved down the board and let the work do what it did. He finished the reinforcement at 520. The light was going amber and long. Shadows stretched thin across the lawn. He had maybe 30 good minutes left, and he used them to do a final check of every new connection, testing each slat with the heel of his hand, looking for play.
There was none. He picked up his tools and knocked on the back door. Maya was at the kitchen table in the green blanket, working through a bowl of plain white rice with a glass of ginger ale beside it. She looked up when he came in with the particular alertness of someone whose fever had broken and whose appetite was cautiously returning. Daddy.
Hey, bug. He pressed the back of his hand to her forehead. Still warm, but the sharpness was gone, not spiked anymore. Just the residual heat of a body that had been working hard and was now winding down. "How's the stomach?" "Better," she said.
Mrs. Ellison says plain rice is the only thing that makes sense. He looked at Margaret, who was rinsing a pot at the sink with her back to him. She didn't turn around. "It usually is," she said. He told Maya to get her shoes.
Then he turned back toward the door and pitched his voice to carry over the water. "I need to come back for the gate. The post anchor set wrong. It's been wrong the whole time. The latch issue was a symptom.
Not the problem. I'd rather pull it out and reset it than put new hardware on a crooked frame." The water stopped. Margaret turned and leaned against the counter with the dish towel in her hands, looking at him. Saturday. Saturday morning works.