Tapestry of Fortunes A Novel - By Elizabeth Berg Page 0,148
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?”