Page 57 of A Song for Another Woman

I glance at him.

He shrugs. "What? This town can smell a secret through drywall."

Lyle folds the sketch carefully, more carefully than I expected. "Then we'd best give them something worth staring at.

The first day, I show up in boots, jeans, and a ball cap pulled low. By nine, everyone on the crew knows who I am. By ten, they stop caring.

A man named Rooster tells me to carry lumber, so I carry lumber. A woman named Tess shows me how to mark studs, then snorts when my first line goes crooked. Lyle puts me on cleanup for an hour after I ask too many questions about the foundation.

"You're paying me to know what I'm doing," he says. "Let that be healing for both of us."

I deserve the broom, so I use it. The work is plain, physical, and humiliating in useful ways. My palms blister by the second afternoon, and a thin red line opens below my thumb. Sawdust gets into my shirt collar, my hair, and the corner of my mouth. No one asks me to sing, no one brings up Melody, and no one cares how many trucks were supposed to be loading for a tour I'm not on.

They care whether the porch posts line up. They care whether the kitchen windows catch the morning. They care whether I move when someone says, "Behind you."

For years, rooms rearranged themselves around me. Doors opened, cars waited, meals appeared, and clothes hung steamed and ready. I started mistaking convenience for being loved.Worse, I let Emmy become part of that machinery: the person who remembered, adjusted, soothed, and supported.

A wife isn't supposed to be infrastructure.

I learn that while standing in mud with a hammer in my hand, missing a nail twice in front of three people who don't bother hiding their amusement.

"Easy," Tess says. "Let the tool do what it's made to do."

I look down at the hammer. It is a ridiculous moment to nearly break. I manage not to. Barely.

By the end of the first week, Harmony Ridge knows. No one says Emmy's name to my face at first. They say other things.

"That's a real pretty piece of land."

"Always liked that dogwood."

"Lot of porch for one man."

At Rayburn Hardware, Mrs. Tandy stops beside me while I'm staring at drawer pulls.

"That house they're building out on County Six like their asses are on fire, yours?" she asks.

I pick up a plain brass pull and put it down again. "Yes, ma'am."

"Hm."

That's all. I wait.

"Oil-rubbed bronze," she says, pointing two shelves down. "Third bin."

Then she walks away.

I stand there for a long second with my hand empty. The third bin is exactly right.

At night, I listen to Emmy. Her voice fills the cabin while my hands throb in a bowl of cold water. She talks to a caller about apology, about how being sorry can be real and still not be enough.

"Changed is the only currency that spends," she says.

I stare at the raw place below my thumb.

I lift my wet hand from the bowl and flex my fingers. The blister pulls.

On Friday, Cy finds me setting porch rail with Lyle.