The room went quiet. Nobody looked confused. Nobody asked what he meant. Four months on a job site together and apparently I hadn't been as subtle as I thought.
Collins opened his mouth.
"Don't," I said.
He closed it. Lasted about four seconds.
"I watched this documentary once," he said, "about people who survive, like, disasters together. Plane crashes, that kind of thing. And apparently it's super common to?—"
"Collins."
"—develop really strong?—"
"Collins."
"—feelings. That's all I'm saying. It's science."
Frank looked at him. "That's not what that documentary was about."
"I'm pretty sure it was."
"It wasn't."
"Well." Collins picked up his broom. "The point stands."
"It's complicated," I said, which I immediately regretted.
"Sure," Frank said.
"Ryan was my best friend."
"Yep."
"I'm not gonna—" I stopped. "It's not appropriate."
Frank set down his tool belt. He turned to face me with the expression of a man who had run out of patience for stupidity sometime around 1987 and never found any more.
"You've been useless all day," he said, "and that woman just drove two hours to stand over a cabinet maker until he got the order right." He picked up his tool belt. "Figure it out."
Walt finished coiling his cord and straightened up slowly, his bad knee clicking. He looked at me with those steady, unhurried eyes.
"My wife wanted a house on Candlewood Lake," he said. "Fifteen years she wanted it. We'd drive out there on Sundays, she'd pick the one she liked. Same house, every time. Little blue cape on the water." He picked up his bag. "I kept saying we weren't ready. Too expensive, wrong time, let's wait." He moved toward the door. "Someone else bought it. She never said a word about it after that."
He paused in the doorway.
"Don't be the guy who waits, Ben."
Then he was gone, his truck rumbling to life in the clearing. Collins grabbed his jacket and followed, pausing just long enough to give me a look that said he agreed with everything Walt had said but was too smart to repeat it.
Frank was the last to leave. He stopped beside me on his way out, tool belt tucked under his arm.
"For what it's worth," he said, "Ryan wasn't as good a friend to you as you were to him."
He walked out before I could respond.
I stood in the empty house as the last of the daylight died, listening to the sound of three trucks pulling down the gravel drive, and didn't have a single thing to say to any of it.
Chapter 29
