He is correct. It is level. Thank you, she says. He nods. Looks at the structure for a long moment.
You're going to make the deadline, he says. I know some people wouldn't have. She looks at him. He is not flattering her. He is stating an assessment the way he would assess the depth of a well.
Some people would have had more help. She says. Something shifts in his expression. Not quite a smile, something beneath a smile, more considered. He starts toward his horse.
"Send word if the roofing is too much," he says. "The roofing is not too much." She splits shingles from a bolt of straight grained cedar she finds at the northern edge of the property. An old tree blown down before she arrived, the grain so clean and straight, she knows immediately what it is for. She does this in the evenings, sitting outside with her back against the rising structure, listening to the mountains settle into dark, and she thinks about Henry, not with the acute grief of the early weeks. This is slower, stranger, beginning to separate the man from the loss, to remember him as a person rather than an absence.
He had been stubborn and funny, and occasionally wrong in ways he refused to admit until the disagreement had technically expired. He had never made her feel like a secondary consideration. She had not fully appreciated how unusual that was until she understood how rare it was. Build it right. He had told her once.
"If you do the work right, it'll last. If you cut corners, it becomes someone else's problem." She patches the roof, [ __ ] the worst wall gaps with clay and dry moss, hangs the door she has built from leftover timber. Not beautiful, but square, solid, fitted with a latch that throws clean. She stands outside and looks at it. It is rough and practical and unmistakably the work of someone who was learning while building, but it is weathertight.
The corners are square. The roof sheds water. It is hers. The night the storm hits, she has been in the cabin a week. It gathers all afternoon and comes down in the third week of August with the particular spite of a storm that has been saving itself.
Wind first, then rains so hard it is nearly horizontal. And she wakes at midnight understanding immediately that the west shingles are not going to hold. She had known when she set them that the west slope was her weakest work, slightly green cedar, trouble keeping the alignment in the upper courses. She had told herself it would be enough. She goes out.