Chapter 9 - The Fracture and the Rebuilding
We stayed in that woodshop until eight o'clock, long after the fire had died down to a bed of glowing coals that smelled of hickory bark and cold iron.
Tessa had helped Meredith pour the rest of the cider, and the two of them had stood together by the tool rack, talking in low, quiet voices about Lucy’s teeth and Miles’s reading tutor. It wasn't an instant forgiveness—women who have watched their husbands try to cut a family in two do not forget the sound of the saw in an afternoon—but it was the beginning of an armistice.
Lucy had taken Caleb up the narrow ladder into Gordon’s loft to find the walnut chest. We could hear their footsteps above us, creaking on the old subfloor, and then Lucy’s high, clear laugh when Caleb found the keyway hidden behind the false plinth Gordon had built into the base.
Russell sat on the edge of the woodbox with David.
It was an odd sight—my son, who had spent ten years pretending he was the lord of the manor because he had six employees and three trucks, sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with a man who had grease under his fingernails and didn't own twenty acres to his name.
"I can look at that flatbed note for you," David said, his voice low and level as he scraped a bit of dried pine gum off his thumb with a pocketknife. "The city garage is auctioning off two four-ton hydraulic winches next Tuesday. If you put one of those on the trailer, you can haul the commercial window casings for the hospital job yourself instead of subbing it to the freight line out of High Point."
Russell looked at him, surprised. "The hospital job?"
"I saw the drawings on your front seat on Friday," David said. "You’ve got thirty-two openings on the north wing. If you haul the glass yourself, you save four thousand on the freight alone. That pays the reserve note on the truck."
Russell looked down at his boots. The Miller jaw was loose now, slack with the specific, humbling relief that comes to a man who realizes the people he tried to starve are the ones offering him bread.
"I didn't think you knew about commercial glass," Russell muttered.
"I know about machines, Russ," David said, closing the knife with a clean, metallic snap. "And I know about loads. You’ve been carrying that business like it was a one-man hand truck for five years. Gordon told me before we got married that you’d rather break your own back than ask a neighbor to take an end of the timber."
"He told you that?"
"He did," David said. "And then he told me to keep an eye on you when the timber money came in, because you’d probably try to use it to buy out your own pride."
Russell let out a short, wet laugh that sounded half like a choke. He reached up and rubbed his face with both hands, leaving two gray streaks of sawdust across his temples. "He knew everything, didn't he?"
"Not everything," I said, stepping between them with Gordon’s old tin coffee pot. "He didn't know how to keep his socks matched, and he didn't know how to tell his son he was proud of him without making it sound like a building code."
Russell looked up at me. His eyes were clear now, the ice melted into something that looked like sorrow, but a clean sorrow that had room for other people inside it.
"Mom," he began.
May you like
"Hush, Russell," I told him, setting the pot on the warm stove. "You’ve done enough talking for four days to last this family until Easter. Drink your cider and go help those children down that ladder before Miles steps through the ceiling plaster."
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