It was slower and it stopped in places. He couldn't make out words and didn't try. She'd told her daughter about the company. She had not told her about Richard. The neighbor came by on foot on the third morning, a woman in a quilted vest walking a small gray dog that had no interest in walking.
She stopped on the road at the end of the drive and looked at the truck for a while and at Noah who was on the backstep doing long division because it was Sunday and then she took out her phone. Daniel was inside the fence line 20 feet from the open kitchen window setting the last footing. He heard Catherine's side of it. He's my contractor Margarite. And then yes, he's been here since Friday.
And then after a stretch I don't. And then, "Yes, I'm aware there's a boy with him. It's his son." "Whatever came next," Catherine didn't answer for a while. "I'll look into it," she said finally and hung up.
She came out onto the terrace with her arms crossed and stood there, and Daniel kept working. "That was a neighbor," she said. "She's Margarite is a very cautious person. She's like that with everybody. It isn't personal."
Daniel finished the edge of the footing and stood up and wiped his hands on the rag hanging from his belt. "You don't have to explain her to me," he said. "You just have to decide what you're going to say next time when I'm not standing here to hear it." He said it without heat, and that was what made it land. Catherine opened her mouth and closed it and went inside.
The next morning, the guard arm at the Whitfield Hollow Gate went up before Daniel had come to a full stop. He sat there a second with his foot on the brake, waiting for the clipboard. The guard raised a hand and waved him through. Then he leaned out of the booth as the truck rolled past. "Miss Hail called the office yesterday," he said.
"Your plates on the standing list now. She also asked us in writing why two other trucks came through Friday without a stop." He shrugged. "Wasn't my shift, but I figured you'd want to know." Somebody asked.
Catherine never mentioned it. The Mercedes came up the drive on Tuesday black and recently washed and parked crooked across two spaces of gravel like the gravel owed it money. The man who got out was tall and pressed and about Catherine's age. He looked at the truck. He looked at the tools laid out on the tarp.
He looked at Daniel. Contractor. That's right. Richard Hail. He didn't put his hand out.
This is my house. Was my house. Daniel went back to tensioning wire. Richard walked the fence line with his hands in his pockets in no hurry and stopped where the new posts stood in their fresh concrete. Whole thing's coming out.