Chapter 6: Two Weeks, She Said

They let me go home on the fourth day, on the condition that I lie on my left side and do nothing.

I lay on my left side in my childhood bedroom and did nothing.

It was the hardest job I had ever had.

My father brought tea on a tray three times a day and stood over me until I drank it.

Dalton came every morning at seven and stayed on the porch until my father let him in.

"The crib," my father said on the first morning. "It's in your truck, boy. You bring it up."

Dalton stood very still.

"Sir?"

"It's heavy and I'm sixty-three. Carry the box upstairs. Build it in the room across the hall. I'll check the bolts."

"Yes, sir."

"Term three says porch," I called from the bed.

"Term three has an exception for lumber," my father said.

I could hear Dalton fighting a smile on the stairs.

The room across the hall had been Jack's.

I had not looked inside it in fourteen months.

Now there was a box of white pine slats in the middle of the floor.

I lay on my side and watched through the open door.

Dalton knelt on the rug and laid out every bolt in rows, the way he did at a job site.

My father stood behind him with a tape measure.

"That's an eighth off," my father said.

"It's the manufacturer's spec."

"It's an eighth off, boy. I strung wire on forty miles of this county. I know what an eighth looks like."

"Then it's an eighth off on the box too."

"Hold it up."

Dalton held up the rail. My father measured it twice, sighed, and gave it back.

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