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  I followed her out to the hall and she leaned over two boxes of twelve-by-twelve tiles. She pulled a few from each box and laid them on the floor. “Which do you like better?”

  One set was a flat icy gray, lifeless and cold. It did not invite bare, post-bath feet. The others were light brown, sand colored, like the ones from the architect’s bathroom from my first day on the job, with streaks of white and dark flecks, each one a little different and much warmer than the other option.

  “These guys, definitely.”

  “Yeah, that’s the way I was leaning.”

  “Is Emily psyched?” I asked, knowing she’d been pleading for this new bathroom for years now.

  “She can’t see it yet.” I knew what she meant. When Emily looked in, she’d see chaos, mess, splintery wood, no walls and no floors, and pipes and wires. It would be hard to imagine how it would all become a room again. I could see it, in this moment before it all came together. I could picture just what it would look like, and moved through the steps quickly in my mind, layer over layer, until it looked like a bathroom.

  I thanked her for the use of her tools, and for lending on-call support when I ran into trouble with the shelves. She waved her hand. “Of course.”

  “Really, Mary, thank you.” And I hoped she understood that I wasn’t just thanking her for the tools.

  “Anytime you want to be the boss, go for it.”

  When Jonah came down to my dad’s to lend a hand with the shelves, I’d been captain, showing him how to use the nail gun, pry trim off a window, use the level. He learned fast and we made a good, efficient team, a welcome surprise to learn that we could collaborate this way. In teaching I came to know I knew this stuff. But the thought of telling Mary what to do? No way.

  “Give me a call if you want help tiling,” I said.

  As I was heading out, I ran into Emily in the hall.

  She leaned in and lowered her voice. “She loved helping you with those shelves.”

  I blushed.

  “No, I really mean it. She really loved it. Every time you asked a question. It made her so happy.”

  The clench in my throat and hot feeling in my face came as a surprise. I tried to swallow it down, didn’t want her to see actual tears, and I thanked Emily again and told her how I loved having the help, that I couldn’t have done it without Mary.

  She leaned in closer and said, “Today’s her birthday.”

  I went back to the bathroom and poked my head in the door. Mary was sitting on the edge of a sheet of plywood, her legs dangling down into the space below the floor. In her wool cap, she looked like a little kid.

  “Happy birthday,” I whispered.

  She turned and smiled and shook her head.

  “She tell you?”

  I nodded.

  “Get outta here, I gotta finish this up so we can go out to dinner.”

  We smiled at each other and I saw myself out. The blue painters’ tape was still on the ceiling in the living room. The hole where the chimney used to be, still patched with a piece of plywood. I climbed down the back stairs and plaster crumbs crunched below my feet. Outside, the trash pile was a comfort, the wood and metal, the cracked tiles, swatches of insulation, door hinges, sawdust, dirt, all wrapped under big blue tarps, with fragments from her cast-iron tub holding it all in place. I pictured the demo guys coming back in the spring to load it all into the back of their big truck, giving Mary a hard time for letting some of the bags fill with water. And as soon as they roared off to bury it all in some trash grave, the pile would start to grow again, one bag and one board at a time.

  The jobs change. We go in and out of other’s people’s homes. A room becomes a different room, altered, with some of its essence intact. Loose tiles become a floor. Boards become shelves. Wood becomes a wall. Places change. Homes change. Weather changes. We change.

  How do we decide what’s right for our own lives? The question never gets easier to answer. If we’re lucky and we pay attention, pieces here and there will start to fit together. Parts shift into place, feel flush underneath the skin of the fingertip. For a moment, the bubble dips and shifts to show you level, at home with what you are, what you have become, and what you are becoming.

  I stood on Mary’s driveway and looked up the side of the house to the bathroom window on the second floor. The light blinked on and a moment later, the sound of hammerbangs rang out, new bones added to old skeleton, Mary upstairs on the floor with her hammer.

  I got into the car and could hear the bangs. I rolled down the window, despite the cold, to hear them as I drove down her block. I stopped at the corner by the big brick church. The sound traveled through the evening air, echoed forward and back. Three more. Bang, bang, bang. Nail through wood. The light turned green and I made the turn toward home, heard one more before the roar of a city bus was the only thing I could hear. The hammerbangs echoed after that anyway. I heard the sound all the way home.

  EPILOGUE

  It’s spring in Cambridge, and Mary and I began our fifth year working together last week, slamming new oak floors into a tiny office in the home of a retired sociology professor. It was, as it is every year, good to be back to it. After some months laboring on this book, it felt especially good to leave the inside of my apartment and the inside of my skull, and nail oak boards to a floor, feel the weight of the miter saw in my arms as I loaded it into Mary’s van, and refamiliarize myself with the power of the crowbar. I felt the work in my shoulders and in my hamstrings when I woke up in the mornings. I walked home from work hungry and tired, happy to see the colorful rockets of crocus pressing out of the mulch in the still-light early evenings.

  In the off-season, I made some tables, large ones and small. With each, I improved. (I cringe a bit to think of the first one I made, that long table for my brother as a birthday gift, functional but crude.) With each, I learned something I didn’t know before. But more than the satisfaction of improvement, building them made me know how much there is to learn. Few things make one more aware of time, and time left, than facing all there is left to learn in a fresh endeavor. The tables stand. They are handsome and do their job as tables should. But there is so much I don’t know.

  Five years with Mary, and the work still feels new. In part, I think, it’s exactly because of all that’s left to learn. The poet Jon Cotner pointed me to the Korean proverb “Knows the way, stops seeing.” It’s not an argument for getting oneself lost, I think, but a nudge to stay awake, stay focused, alert even when time and experience have dulled us. Excitement arises from not knowing, from continuing to see, from trying to puzzle through. It’s daunting—how much there is to know—and motivating, too. For now, I am satisfied to continue to get it wrong and try again and again to get it better and get it right.

  With each table, with each wall and floor, with each set of bookcases built and filled so the shelves are heavy with books, comes the knowledge that all of it will fall apart someday. In our lifetimes, or after, these walls and floors and shelves will no longer do their jobs. The wood will splinter, rot, maybe get used for firewood, maybe get traded for some new model or discarded at the dump, scrap wood, sawdust, dead. This is their fate, and ours, as use and time enact their wearing. And I get carried away sometimes—I put my palm down on a sanded-smooth plank of black walnut and I feel the vibration there, I see the galaxy-swirl grain, and I think of the tree that stood to make this board, its roots veining deep into the soil, dark and warm, its long branches, its feather-shaped leaves in the wind, at sway and still. And here it is now, beneath my hand, joined, glued, clamped, turning into a table. A thing’s becoming other than it was.

  “What was is now no more,” writes Ovid, “and what was not has come to be. Renewal is the lot of time.” We are all unfinished after all.

  Mary and I start a kitchen next week, right back into the thick of it. It will be hard work. “Do some push-ups this weekend,” Mary told me as we parted ways on Friday afternoon. So I did.

  ACKNOWLE
DGMENTS

  Matt Weiland, the editor of this book, has the amazing ability to make you have so much work to do sound like you can do it. I’m so grateful I was able to work with someone as patient, funny, and wise. This book would not be, and would not be what it is, without him. My curious, spirited, and enthusiastic agent, Gillian MacKenzie, has been a candid source of guidance and support from the start, and I feel hugely lucky to be teamed up with her. I appreciate Nancy Green’s sharp and sensitive copyediting, and am grateful to the efforts and hours the folks at Norton put in to help bring this book into being. And my thanks go to artist Joe McVetty for the elegant drawings of tools. I am inarticulatably grateful to my parents. To my mother, for the scarves, blankets, and mittens, for the wristlettes, hats, and turtle wraps, which is to say, for all the warmth. To my father, for his high standards. I’m especially grateful to my brothers, the two people I laugh the hardest with: to Will, who is the best storyteller I know, and to Sam, my trusted ally, to whom I turned more than anyone for help and feedback on this book. Pamela Murray’s generosity, attention, and eagerness to celebrate occasions big and small has been a source of strength and warmth. I thank Goody-Goody, for the education. I thank Jenny White, for her kindness and care, her pep talks and perspective. I’ll never know a better listener. I thank Alicia Simoni, whose depth of insight and understanding has helped me with this book and with much more than this book. I feel lucky to have shared meals and laughs with Joe and Laila Fontela. I’m grateful to Grub Street for helping me start, and to the Boston Phoenix, for being a wonderful way to spend my twenties. I give thanks to Richard Baker and Leona Cottrell, to Philip Connors, and to Mary, of course. And above all, to Jonah James Fontela, for whom love is an inadequate word.

  Copyright © 2015 by Nina MacLaughlin

  All rights reserved

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  Drawings by Joseph McVetty III

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