Two Time Read Free

undermined his social skills. Sullivan squatted down to scratch his ears.
    “Those ain’t beams,” he yelled up to me. “Beams’re horizontal. Those’re rafters.”
    “Take that up with Seymour.”
    “Who’s Seymour?”
    “Seymour Glass.”
    “Don’t know him.”
    “Hell of a carpenter.”
    “Work alone, does he?” Sullivan asked.
    “In a manner of speaking.”
    “Maybe he could help.”
    “This is the only hard part.”
    “What, framing the house?”
    “Setting the ridge plate. Confounds even the most subtle minds.”
    “Not the guys I used to work with. Dumber’n shit. Could still set a ridge plate.”
    I tapped the side of the rafter into perfect position with the ridge and checked it with the framing square. The joint at the plate still had a big ugly gap.
    “Done some building?” I asked Sullivan.
    “All over the Island. Set a lot of ridge plates. Never did it by myself.”
    “It’s simple engineering. It’s all in the numbers. A few calculations and about a hundred years of fiddling around and she’s in there, dead nuts.”
    “I’d come up there and help you but I’m on duty”
    “Sure, hide behind the badge.”
    “You wouldn’t let me anyway.”
    “Probably not.”
    “Too pigheaded.”
    “There’s beer in the refrigerator.”
    “I can help you with that.”
    “On duty?”
    “They encourage it.”
    He disappeared into the original part of the cottage. I was working on an addition off the back. Improving my place in the world. I’d drawn it up, and so far had done all the work myself, shy of pouring the concrete. My father had dug the hole for the original building with a pick and shovel and laid up the foundation out of cinder block. It was more necessity than heroics. He had very little money. Made up for it with grim determination.
    “I got you one,” Sullivan called up from just outside the rear door.
    I slid the hammer into the holster on my tool belt and lowered the unraised rafter down to the floor deck. Maybe the whole roof system would work itself out while I washaving a beer with Sullivan. Sometimes lumber would do that if you left it alone long enough.
    “What’s it gonna be?” Sullivan asked me as I was climbing down the ladder.
    “What?”
    “That.” He pointed with the neck of the beer. “What’re you building?”
    “Bedroom. Bath. Little storage upstairs. More shop room in the basement.”
    He took a long drink.
    “Why don’t you plow the whole thing under and build a new house?” His gaze wandered out on the bay as he wiped his mouth on his sleeve. “You gotta great lot here.”
    “How’s that beer?”
    “Cold.”
    I unbuckled the tool belt and let it drop to the ground. It was an electrician’s belt, but I liked it for carpentry, too. Lots of clever little pockets and a sturdy, built-in hammer holster. I took off a separate nail apron and pulled up my terry cloth sweatband so I could wipe the bottle across my forehead. The heavy wet heat made it a bad day to toss around Douglas fir and dimensional calculations. Sullivan, Eddie and I walked over to the two handmade Adirondack chairs I kept under a leafy Norway maple. Eddie spread himself out on the grass. Sullivan and I took the chairs.
    I liked all the seasons here at the edge of the Little Peconic, but the extremes of summer and winter were a little less likable. In dead winter you had howling, salt-filled winds blowing through secret cracks in the walls and down the front of your foul-weather gear. In deep summer the air would often come to a dead stop, letting all that drippy, cottony heat glob up your cardiovascular system and dull your mental functions.
    “How’s your ass?” he asked me.
    “Beg pardon?”
    “I heard they pulled about a hundred glass splinters out of your ass.”
    “Less than fifty Out of my back. Nothing in the gluteus.”
    “So no big sweat.”
    “All the little cuts are sealed over, but I’m still sleeping on my stomach. Got back seventy percent in my right ear,