"Marcus Johnson." He took the hand. Harold's grip was firmer than his frame led on, the handshake of a man who'd spent his life doing real work with real hands. "Well, Marcus Johnson." Harold looked at the boards, then at his own trembling fingers, and there was something almost shy in the way he said it.
"I hate to admit it, but I'd be lying if I said I didn't need a hand." "That's why I'm here." "You've got somewhere to be. I can see it on you. You look like a man with a family waiting on him."
Marcus paused. That one landed closer than Harold could have known. "I do," he said quietly. "But she'll keep. Let's get these boards loaded before you go and put yourself in the hospital, and then we'll both go home."
It should have taken 5 minutes. It took an hour because somewhere around the second board, the two men fell into the kind of talk that surprises you. The kind that has no business happening between two strangers on the side of a road, and yet does, and yet feels by the end like it was always supposed to. "So, what's all this lumber for?" Marcus asked, sliding a board up over the tailgate while Harold guided the other end. "You building an ark?"
"Because I've got some concerns about the flooding situation around here." "A garden house," Harold said. "Out back of my place." He paused, and something crossed his face.
"It'sโIt was my wife's idea years ago. She always wanted a little house in the garden, somewhere to sit in the mornings, somewhere to watch the birds and drink her coffee and not have anybody bother her." Marcus caught the was. He caught it the way only another man who'd lived it could catch it. "How long?" he asked.
He didn't have to say more than that. Harold looked at him, understood the question. "Three years now." "I'm sorry." "Forty-one years we were married."
Harold ran his hand along the top board slow. "You know what's strange? It's not the big things that get you. It's the small ones. It's making one cup of coffee instead of two."
"It's nobody telling you the news is on. It'sโ" He stopped, cleared his throat. "Anyway, she always wanted that garden house. I kept saying I'd build it. Kept putting it off."
"Work, life. You know how it goes. And then one day there wasn't any more time to put it off with." Marcus set his end of the board down carefully. "So you're building it now."
"I'm building it now," Harold said. "Bit late, but I figure better late than one more thing I never did for her." For a moment, neither of them said anything. Then Marcus picked up the next board and they kept working. "What about you?" Harold asked.