Chapter 7: The Back Step

At nine the next morning, I stood at my grandmother's kitchen window with a cup of coffee and watched my husband fix her back step.

My ex-husband.

The papers had said so for four years and ten months.

He worked on his knees with a hammer and a coffee can of nails, and he didn't look at the house once.

I'd slept in my childhood bed with Lou curled against my back, and I hadn't slept at all.

"Mama," Lou said from the doorway, in her pajamas. "Who's outside?"

"The man from the hospital."

"The one with the dogs?"

"That one," I said.

"Can I go?"

I thought about it for as long as I could stand to.

"Put on shoes," I said. "And a coat."

She was out the screen door in the time it took me to find her other sock.

I stood in the door and watched.

Lou stopped a polite distance from him and put her hands behind her back, which is how she approaches anything she wants to touch.

"Are you fixing the step?" she said.

"I am."

"Mémère says it was broken since the flood."

"There was a flood?" Gabe asked.

"A little one. Mémère said it was a biblical little one."

He laughed, and it startled him, and I saw him look at the hammer.

"Do you want to hand me nails?"

"How many?"

"Four. Just one at a time," Gabe said.

She took the job seriously.

She handed him each nail with the point toward her own hand, which I corrected from the door.

She turned it around without a fuss.

I watched his face while she was looking at the wood.

He looked at her the whole time.

He didn't say anything to her about anything that mattered.

He only asked whether she liked boudin, and whether she had ever seen a nutria.

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