Just ran the block back and forth until my shoulder burned, because I needed something to do with my hands that wasn't thinking. The wood was already smooth. Had been smooth yesterday. I kept going anyway.
Outside, Collins and Frank were hanging the last of the exterior doors—I could hear the thud of the jamb setter, the occasional curse when the shimming was off. Walt was upstairs somewhere, his footsteps slow and deliberate across the subfloor as he worked through the closet trim. The sounds of a house that was almost finished.
Olivia was at the folding table in the garage, same as every morning. Laptop open, coffee going cold beside her. I'd seen her pull in just after seven. We'd nodded at each other across the clearing like two people who worked together and nothing more.
Mostly that was on me.
Ruth had shown up in Ryan's hoodie, and that was enough. Somewhere between the drive home and the drive back, the thing I'd been carefully not examining had examined itself. Four months out here and Ryan had become mostly abstract — a name on blueprints, a set of decisions I was correcting. ThenRuth had looked up at this house with those eyes, and he wasn't abstract anymore. He was her son. He was my best friend. And Olivia wasn't just Liv.
I ran the sanding block back over wood that didn't need it and told myself to get it together.
The truck came in just before nine.
I heard the air brakes before the truck cleared the tree line, then the long groan of a heavy load settling as it rolled to a stop in the clearing. Three weeks out from the original schedule, which had cost us a rescheduled countertop template and a very unpleasant call with the fabricator that Olivia had handled without complaining.
I set down the sanding block and walked outside.
The driver was already dropping the tailgate, and what I saw when he pulled back the moving blankets made my stomach drop. An upper cabinet—a long, expensive run of shaker-style maple in the finish we'd specified—had a corner crushed inward, the face frame splintered. And that was the first one I looked at.
"How many?" I asked.
The driver shrugged. "Few look roughed up. Rest seem okay."
I pulled back the next blanket. Wrong finish. These were supposed to be the lower cabinets—same maple as the uppers. These were painted white, and not even close to the finish we'd ordered.
"Hey." Olivia's voice, behind me. She'd come out of the garage without me noticing, her clipboard already in hand. She looked at the painted cabinet, then at me. "That's not maple."
"No."
"And that one's?—"
"Yeah."
She stepped up onto the tailgate without being asked and started pulling blankets back, methodically, moving through thestack. I watched her sort as she went—uppers to the left, lowers to the right, damaged ones called out with a tap of her pen. She didn't look at me. I didn't look at her.
"Four damaged uppers," she said finally. "And the entire lower run is the wrong finish." She jumped down and turned to the driver. "I need your delivery manifest."
He handed it over. She scanned it, then held it next to her clipboard and compared the two documents line by line, her finger moving down the page.
"They pulled from the wrong order," she said, half to herself. "Someone transposed the job numbers." She looked up at the driver. "The lowers all go back. Today."
"Lady, I've got four more stops?—"
"I understand that." Her voice was even. Pleasant, almost. "But I'm not signing for a twenty-thousand-dollar order that's half wrong and a quarter destroyed. So here's what's going to happen."
I leaned against the truck and let her go.
She was on the phone with the supplier inside of two minutes, the delivery manifest folded under her arm. I could tell from twenty feet away that they were giving her the runaround — her jaw tightened, she pulled the phone from her ear and looked at it for a second like it had personally offended her, then put it back. This was the second time this supplier had gotten the order wrong. The first time she'd accepted the apology and the revised confirmation email and trusted that it wouldn't happen again. The driver stood beside his truck waiting, and I kept unloading.
I started unloading the undamaged uppers myself, stacking them carefully against the garage wall. Walt could still install these today—it would keep him on schedule while we waited on the lower replacements. Something to do. Something that kept my hands moving and my eyes off her.
Collins appeared at my elbow. "Bad?"
"Four damaged uppers, whole lower run is wrong finish. Lowers are going back."
He winced. "How far does that set us back?"
"Depends how fast she can get them to turn around a replacement order." I lifted another cabinet, the wood heavier than it looked. "Ten days if she can hold them to it."
