There was a stretch of about 4 seconds where the only sound was the wind in the hedge, and Daniel let it sit there without filling it. Then he looked down at his own clothes and back up at her. "I'm also the one who's responsible when it comes down again," he said. "So you tell me, do you want it fast or do you want it right?"
Catherine's phone buzzed in her hand. She glanced at it and something in her face closed. "You have until noon," she said, and went back up the steps. Daniel walked to the truck and shut the passenger door gently, the way you shut a door when someone's inside it. You heard that?
He said through the open window. Yeah, so did I. Noah looked at him for a second longer, then went back to his book and Daniel went to get his shovel. What he found in the next 2 hours was this. Three posts out of plumb, two footings cracked through, and one section of mesh that somebody had repaired at some point with zip ties and a prayer.
That was the visible part, the part the delivery truck had earned. The part it hadn't earned was underneath. Two posts on the north end came out of the ground, soft, the wood gone dark and spongy at the base rot that had been working quietly for 3 or 4 years. And when Daniel followed the grade with his eye, and then with a length of string, he found the reason a downspout run off the side of the garage that dumped everything it caught into the low corner and let it sit against the footings. The truck hadn't broken the fence.
The truck had just been the thing that finally leaned on it. He wrote the estimate on the tailgate and brought it to the door. Catherine read it twice. "This is $1,100 under the lowest bid I got." "All right, which means you've left something out."
"I priced what I can see," Daniel said. "If I open the ground and find something else, I call you before I do the work, and I don't bill you for the time you spend deciding." She looked up from the paper. Why not? Because that's not how I'd want somebody to treat me.
She was a woman who had an answer for everything, and for a moment she had none, and Daniel could see that the silence bothered her more than the estimate had. She handed the page back with her initials at the bottom. "Start today," she said, "and call me before you dig anything I haven't paid for." The girl came out around one. She was 12 or thereabouts in a hoodie two sizes too big.
And she stood at the edge of the grass for a while before she came closer. "Why are you taking that one out?" she asked. "That one's fine." Daniel set down the bar.
"Come here a second. Put your hand right at the bottom. Push." She crouched and pressed her thumb into the base of the post, and her eyebrows went up as the wood gave under it like wet cardboard. It's soft, rotted from the inside.