This Is Where We Live - By Janelle Brown Page 0,82

happened—just a painting, a bit of nostalgia, too much stress on both their parts. She’d go home and they’d talk it out. We’ll go to therapy, she thought. It can’t possibly be as bad as it seemed. We just need to stay the course, communicate better. And maybe once he’s happier, he’ll be open to selling that painting. She briefly considered the Lucy issue, and what she might have to say—or, more accurately, get Jeremy to say—to their roommate to keep her from moving out. They couldn’t afford to lose the rental income.

She noticed the light first, a red strobe coursing across the horizon, and then the smell of charred wood. A fire engine was parked on their block, with three men in yellow fire jackets winding a hose back into its housing. Water poured down the hill toward her car, a deluge that filled the divots in the asphalt and splashed up against her tires. It wasn’t until Claudia was nearly home, and could see Lucy standing helplessly in the street next to Jeremy—balancing the enormous painting upright with his left hand—that she realized that the fire truck was parked in front of her own house.

Jeremy

THERE WERE SEVENTY-EIGHT VARIETIES OF NAILS FOR SALE IN Home Depot, and Jeremy couldn’t fathom the differences between most of them. He stood there in the carpentry aisle, contemplating the function of the L-shape flooring nail and the PNI hardened T-nail, wondering whether he needed 1⅜-inch nails or 1¼-inch nails or whether he should just buy the 2000-piece PortaNail Complete Nailing Kit and be done with it. The thrum of a forklift reverberated off the warehouse ceiling, and a red light flashed at the end of the aisle, summoning someone who never seemed to arrive. He hated this place; it was a reminder of his own inadequacies as a man. Men were supposed to know how to buy nails, why a wet/dry shop vac was necessary, the uses of plywood versus pressure-treated lumber. Not Jeremy. Three years later, he still hadn’t opened the forty-eight-bit drill set that his father-in-law had given him for their first Christmas because, frankly, the thing terrified him.

He grabbed three boxes of nails at random and turned, nearly colliding into Barry, who had come up silently behind him. His father-in-law shook his head when he saw what Jeremy held in his hands.

“Those aren’t going to do us any good. They’re good for stapling paper together and that’s about it.” Barry shuffled over to the wall of nails and selected four different boxes, depositing them in the cart that sat, laden with lumber and drywall, in the center of the aisle. He scratched the liver spot that capped the bald crown of his head and then tugged at the sagging waistband of his pleat-front slacks. “For what we’re doing, we’ll also need a nail gun, preferably a Stanley, and some sturdy 3½-inchers. I can’t believe you two don’t own a nail gun. I could have sworn I gave you one. What have you been using, a regular old double-face?”

It was a pointed question, as far as Jeremy could tell: Jeremy had already given Barry ample evidence that he had no clue as to what was in their toolbox. If the seventy-one-year-old man was trying to show him up, he was succeeding. “I don’t know,” he said, and smiled to hide his humiliation. “I don’t think we’ve been using anything, actually.”

Barry ran his hands authoritatively over a stack of lethal-looking nail guns and chuckled. “You know, when Claudie was four years old she asked me for a hammer for Christmas? She had her very own toolbox, full of little kid-size tools, and she used to play with them just like they were dolls.” Jeremy did know this, since Barry liked to repeat this fact rather frequently, as if this one fleeting moment in Claudia’s otherwise undistinguished hardware career had bonded father and daughter together permanently. In the three days that Barry and Ruth had been in town, he’d already brought this fact up at least four times. It was quite likely that Barry’s memory was starting to go. He was starting to drive Jeremy a little nuts.

But really, Jeremy shouldn’t complain, because his in-laws were saving their asses. Barry, who had spent time as a general contractor before opening up two hardware stores in the Mantanka area, was going to do most of the basic repairs on the house—at least, those that didn’t require any seriously heavy labor—and it also hadn’t gone