Tapestry of Fortunes A Novel

28


“Construction?” I say. “You’re kidding!”

“No, I’m not,” Stacy, the woman at the employment agency, tells me. “They’re desperate, and I can’t find anyone else. It’s easy work, the guy says; he says anyone can do it. And it pays well.”

“But I don’t know anything about construction!”

“You don’t have to. He’ll show you what you need to do. You just put on some old clothes, bring some gloves, and he’ll take care of the rest. You want the job?”

“Well … Yes.”

Stacy tells me the address of the job site, and I go upstairs to change. Bib overalls. A flannel shirt. A ponytail. My hiking boots. All of a sudden, I feel cool.

Mark Quinton is killer handsome. The kind of guy who should be posing for calendar pictures for women’s fantasies. He’s up on a ladder wearing work boots, jeans, a tool belt, and a white T-shirt with Quinton Construction Company written beneath a picture of a circular saw. He looks down at me when I come into the room, smiles. “Can I help you?”

“I’m here from the agency. Sam Morrow?”

“You’re Sam?”

“Yes.”

“I thought you were a man.”

“No, I … It’s Samantha. Did you need a man?”

“No, it doesn’t make any difference. Glad to have you.” He climbs down from the ladder, comes over to shake my hand. “My partner is sick today, and I’m way behind on this job.”

“I have to tell you, I don’t know anything about construction.”

“Ever used a hammer?”

“Well, sure.”

“Then you know something about construction.”

I look around the room. Thick sheets of plastic for a roof and walls. Sawhorses, a circular saw resting on one of them. Stacks of lumber, boxes of ceramic tile. Huge quantities of long nails. Large pieces of plywood. Piles of sawdust, a space heater that’s doing a great job keeping the place warm. “So. What do you want me to do?”

“First thing is a coffee break,” Mark says. “You like cranberry muffins?”

“Yes, I do.”

He opens a bag, spreads out a napkin on boards over a sawhorse, sets out two muffins. Then he opens a thermos and pours two cups of coffee into paper cups. “It’s got milk in it,” he says. “That’s what me and my partner like.”

“That’s fine.”

“No sugar.”

“Perfect.”

“What we’re doing is a kitchen/family room,” he says. “And what I’m working on today is the roof and the window frames. I need you to take a shitload of nails out of some plywood that I’m going to reuse on the roof. That’ll be the first thing. Okay?”

“Fine.”

“Then I’ll need you to take my truck and run an errand. Go down to the lumberyard and pick up some supplies. You just tell them my name, and they’ll load you up.”

“Okay.” I finish my muffin in two huge bites, gulp down the coffee. “I’m ready.”

“You’re going to work out fine,” Mark says, grinning. He turns on a radio splattered with paint. “You like country and western?”

“Uh-huh.”

“You got to hear country and western when you’re working construction.”

I watch as he shows me how to take the nails out: hammer on the pointed ends until they’re almost all the way out; then turn the board over and pry them out by the heads. Put them in the plastic bucket—save them.

I work on this for two hours, then say I’m finished. He comes down, looks at the boards that I’ve stacked neatly in the corner. “Good.” He looks at me, nods. “Come over here, I’ll teach you to build a header. That’s what goes along the top of the window, to support the weight of the roof.”

He lays out two boards of uneven length, tells me to align them at one end, then nail them together. “Here, and here,” he says, indicating where the nails should go. “Avoid the knotholes.” I look around nervously. “Are the owners here?”

“Shit, no. Ain’t nobody home anymore. People hire me to do these beautiful things to their houses and then they’re never in them.” He hands me a nail. “This is a tenpenny bright,” he says. “Drive it, girl.”

I place the nail, tap tentatively at it.

“Use your shoulder,” Mark says. “Get your weight into your swing. And stand off to the side a little.”

I do as he tells me and the nail makes its way a good third of the way in. I look up, a little thrilled.

“That’s right,” he says.

I pound again. It feels so good.

“Sink it!” Mark says, and I do.

“I’m not going to tell you what I was thinking while I did that,” I say, straightening, my hands on my hips.

“You don’t have to,” he says, and hands me another nail.

It was nothing about David, what I was thinking. It was about me. I was thinking, “I! Am! Worth! Something!”

Mark climbs the ladder, and I finish nailing the boards together. When I’m through, he looks down and says, “See that? You just built a header.”

I take a breath. Nod. Nod again.

“Now go and get the keys to my truck, they’re in my jacket,” Mark says. “Then go to National Lumber—you know where it is?”

I do know. I’ve driven past it many times, and I tell Mark this.

“All right. Go on over there and tell them you need what I called about this morning. And then we’ll have lunch.”

“Burger King?” I say.

“Is that what you like?”

“I thought that’s what you guys ate all the time.”

“I like those tofu roll-ups,” Mark says. “But I could do a Whopper.”

We sit at a small table by the window at Burger King. Mark is telling me about the time he got kicked out of his Catholic school for falling in love with a nun.

“Are you serious?” I ask.

He nods. “She was real young. And I saw one day that there were all these little hairs escaping from her wimple. I thought, whoa! that’s a woman under there! Before that, I thought they … I didn’t really think they were women. I thought they were a kind of separate species.”

“So you saw her hair and fell in love?”

“Well, not right away. What happened was, I was a pretty good artist. And she used to take me outside, up on a hill, and let me draw. And she would just sit with me, read, sometimes she’d read out loud, it was nice. And then one day we started holding hands, hugging a little.” He shrugs. “Kissin’ … Anyway, somebody saw us and I got expelled and she got fired. Never saw her again.”

“How old were you?” I ask.

“Twelve.”

“Twelve!”

He takes a sip of his Coke. “Yup. I got a son coming up on twelve now. I look at him sometimes, you know? He doesn’t tell me anything anymore.”

“I know,” I say. “They stop.”

“Right around ten, they start getting pretty quiet.”

“It’s true.”

“Makes you kind of miss the days when they ran around with their pacifiers, their little tummies hanging over their diapers. ’Member that? Those little belly buttons?”

I smile at him. What a good man.

Mark crumples up his bag. “Ready to go back to work?”

“Yeah.” In the truck on the way back, I look at my hands. Two blisters starting. I couldn’t be more proud.