Chapter 23: The Recovery
They discharged him on a Friday with a sheaf of instructions, a prescription he filled and mostly ignored in the particulars, and a warning that his left side was, for six weeks, a region of negotiation rather than use. Otis drove him home in the diner's van, slowly, the way a man drives with a cake aboard.
The porch stopped him at the gate. He had known about it โ Sarah had told him plainly, having decided early that Boone was not a man to be protected from facts โ but knowing and seeing were different counties. The fire had taken the porch's east corner and the rail, blackened the siding in a rising handprint, and eaten the step where June used to set the watering can. The house behind it stood sound and shut-eyed. The yellow raincoat hung by the front door where he could see it through the screen, exactly where he had left it a lifetime ago, which is to say ten days.
"Kitchen door's clear," Otis said. "We've been coming in that way. Fridge is full. Don't argue."
He did not argue. Arguing required a posture his side had vetoed.
The lumber arrived before he had finished his first careful circuit of the rooms. Not lumber he had ordered. Dale and Pete Rennick from the diner, and behind them two long-haul drivers Boone knew by rig and first name โ Marcus with the reefer, Tom Begay who ran produce out of the valley โ backing a flatbed up his lane with pressure-treated beams and a borrowed nail gun and an air of men attending an appointment the universe had made without consulting him.
"Now, before you start," Dale said, holding up a hand, "you held the flashlight for my rig in February for three hours in sleet, old man, and my father-in-law's funeral dinner your June organized in โ "
"June did that," Boone said.
"Debts don't expire," Tom said, "just because the bookkeeper's gone. Where do you want the saw?"
They rebuilt the porch in two days, and would not take money, and barely took lunch. Boone sat in a lawn chair with his instructions' ghost upon him and supervised in the only capacity allowed, which was remembering where things had been. The new rail went where the old rail had been. The new step was set where June's watering can had stood, and Dale, who had not known that, set it there anyway, because porches remember their own geometry. Sarah came by both evenings with soup in a pot she carried like a reliquary, and walked him the length of the lane and back at a pace she set and he pretended to resent.
"You bully all your patients?" he asked, a little winded.
"Only the ones I bring soup," she said. "Walk to the mailbox. Slow counts. Then I'll think about letting you hold a hammer again someday."
The work had a rhythm Boone recognized from every job site of his youth: long stretches of hammering and measurement in which nobody said anything that mattered, and then, over coffee from the diner's thermos, the things that did. Marcus, resting his forearms on the new rail, told him the reefer had broken down outside Pittsburgh in February and that he had sat in the cab in the sleet thinking the old man from the diner would have been under the hood already, flashlight in his teeth, cursing the manufacturer by name. Boone, who had no memory of being anyone's voice in a breakdown, filed that away with the other surprises of the week.
Nobody would discuss the fire itself, and Boone understood the mercy in that too. What they discussed was lumber grades and the price of deck screws and whether the county would ever fix the culvert at the bottom of the lane. When the last board was down and swept, Dale chalked a line on the new step and dated it in pencil on the underside, the way carpenters sign work no one will see. "So it knows when it was done right," he said.
The house changed around him in small accretions, the way a place does when it resumes being lived in rather than kept. The card Poppy had made went on the refrigerator under a magnet shaped like a strawberry, an item he would once have died before displaying. Dishes accumulated honestly in the sink and were honestly washed. He slept โ badly at first, then less badly โ in the bedroom he had been treating for four years as storage for a life he was maintaining rather than living, and one morning he woke to birdsong and his own coffee and realized the coat by the door no longer looked like an exhibit. It looked like a coat, in a house, where a man lived who was getting better. He stood in the kitchen doorway a while with that, and then he made eggs, badly, left-handed, and ate every one.