"I'm going to kill him." She said it with real affection. "He's been trying to marry me off since I turned 30. Every man he meets, the mailman, his cardiologist, a 22-year-old who came to fix the cable. He doesn't discriminate."
She shook her head. "I'm so sorry. Whatever he said to you, you can ignore it. You don't have toโ" "He said I stopped when nobody was watching," Marcus said. Emily stopped.
The lightness dropped out of her expression, replaced by something more careful, more real. "He said that?" "Yeah." She looked at him differently then. Not the sizing-up look from before. Something quieter.
"That's a big thing for him to say about somebody," she said. "My dad doesn't hand those out." Before Marcus could answer, the back door banged open and Harold came out onto the porch with a box of nails in his hand and a grin already splitting his face. "Well, well, well," Harold said. "Look who changed his mind."
"I came to say hello," Marcus said. "That's all. I'm not staying." "Sure. Sure." Harold set the nails down and clapped his hands together, delighted, ignoring every word Marcus had just said.
"You two introduce yourselves." "We managed," Emily said dryly. "Dad, we need to talk about your definition of subtle." "I don't know what you're talking about." Harold's face was the picture of innocence.
He turned to Marcus. "Since you're here, and since you're a construction man, I don't suppose you'd take a look at this frame. Emily's doing her best, but she designs the pretty parts. The loadbearing parts, that's a different animal." "Excuse me," Emily said.
"I designed the pretty parts of a hospital last year. It's still standing." "The frame, Marcus," Harold said, steering him by the elbow toward the half-built structure and completely running over his daughter's objection. "Just tell me it won't fall on my head." And that was how Marcus Johnson, who had come to stay 15 minutes, ended up spending the entire afternoon.
I didn't mean to. He kept meaning to leave. But the frame did have a problem. Two of the corner joints were going to fail under a real roof load, and Marcus couldn't, in good conscience, walk away and let a 75-year-old man build something that might come down on him. So he took off his jacket.
And then he was up on the step stool showing Emily how to sister a second board onto the joint for strength. And she was arguing with him about it. And he was realizing she wasn't arguing to be difficult, but because she actually understood the physics and had a point. And somewhere in the back and forth, the afternoon just got away from all of them. "You're holding the level wrong," Emily said.