“You’re going to split the wood if you keep hitting it at that angle.”
“I’ve got it.”
“You don’t have it. Angle the nail.”
“I am angling it.”
“More. Like you’re aiming for the corner, not the center.”
I adjusted. The nail went in clean. She made a sound that might have been approval.
“Your husband taught you all this?” I asked.
“Harold taught me what not to do. I figured out the rest myself.” She sipped her coffee. “He was a terrible handyman. Best man I ever knew, but terrible with tools. I used to wait until he left for work and redo everything he’d fixed the night before.”
“Did he know?”
“Of course he knew. He wasn’t stupid. He just liked the ritual of it. He’d fix something, I’d fix his fix, and neither of us said a word about it. Forty-two years of that.” She sighed, and I knew she was reminiscing. “I miss the ritual more than the fixes.”
I hammered the last nail and sat back on my heels. The step was solid under my hand when I pressed it.
“Not bad,” she said. She came out and tested it with her foot, pressing down hard, shifting her weight side to side. “It’ll hold.”
“Thank you for the help.”
“You did the work. I just told you how to do it correctly.” She paused at the door, her hand on the frame. “There’s a lightbulb out in the hallway upstairs. I can’t reach it.”
“I’ll take care of it.”
“And the water heater makes a noise when the hot water runs.”
“I’ll look at it.”
She went inside. I sat on the new step and looked at the street and understood what was happening. She wasn’t giving me chores because she couldn’t find someone else. She was handing me pieces of her house, one task at a time, letting me touch the place where Andrea grew up. Each broken thing she pointed me toward was an inch of trust I hadn’t earned yet but was being given the chance to.
I replaced the lightbulb. I looked at the water heater, which turned out to be the pressure valve like she’d guessed, and I fixed it with a wrench and a YouTube tutorial on my phone while crouched in a closet that smelled like laundry detergent. I tightened the fence post with a brace I built from scrap wood. None of it was glamorous. None of it was what a King was supposed to spend his time doing. But every task she gave me kept me in this house a little longer, and I was willing to fix every broken thing in Whitebrook if it meant being close to Andrea while I did it.
That evening she invited me to stay for dinner. Not breakfast, which I’d been eating with them every morning, but dinner. The meal where they sat down together at the dining table with cloth napkins and talked about their day. Breakfast was functional. Dinner was family.
“Pot roast,” she said. “You eat meat?”
“Yes ma’am.”
“Good. Set the table. Plates are in the cabinet above the sink.”
I set the table. Andrea came down from her room and stopped in the kitchen doorway when she saw three plates instead of two.
“He’s staying for dinner,” she called from the stove without looking up.
“I can see that.” She looked at me. I looked at her. She pulled out her chair and sat down.
The pot roast was the best thing I’d eaten since I left Atlanta. We ate at the dining table with cloth napkins she’d pressed, a small vase of garden flowers in the center. She told me about the roof tiles that needed replacing, the neighbor’s dog that kept digging under the fence, the church choir that had lost its tenor.
“Am I the only person in this town who can carry a tune? Mrs. Patterson claims she’s an alto but that woman has been sharp for thirty years. I’ve been too polite to say anything.”
“You’ve been too polite?” Andrea said. “Since when?”
“I’m polite when it serves me.”
