“I know.”
“I can cut it.”
I stared at him. In thirty-six years, I had never once seen my father pick up a tool.
“Dad…”
“Your grandfather taught me,” he said, not looking at me. “Before I decided it wasn’t respectable.”
Copper trotted across the yard, sniffed my father’s shoe with great suspicion, then leaned his full weight against the man’s leg. My father looked down at him as if he’d been handed a medal.
“Well,” he muttered. “Hello.”
Mr. Alvarez came out of the barn with a handsaw and an expression of perfect neutrality. “Mr. Merrick. Heard you’re good with a level.”
“I used to be.”
“Good. I’m terrible.”
By summer the porch stood straight. By fall we’d repainted the siding, a bright, clean white. The old hickory in the yard didn’t survive, but my father, with a quiet nod to the memory of the man who’d built the place, planted a young one in its spot.
