I Left Him at the Altar, So the Best Man Took Me Off the Island novel · Chapter 15 of 40

Chapter 15: Fern's Stories

Fern came on Saturday with a truckload of cedar shakes, a nail gun, and two of the lobstermen's sons.

"We're doing the roof," he said.

"The shed doesn't have walls."

"It has a north wall and a half. That's enough to hang a roof on."

I climbed the ladder with my bandaged hand in a glove, and nobody told me to get down.

Ansel came at noon.

He hadn't said a word to me since the pie, but he carried a load of shakes up the ladder without being asked, and he worked on the far side of the ridge.

We spent the afternoon on opposite slopes of the same roof.

I could hear him the whole time.

The thump of the nail gun, the scrape of his boots, the quiet sound he made when he stretched his back.

"Your father," Fern said, from the rafters, "once built a whole hull in a week, to win a bet."

"He did not."

"Forty-one hours. Cedar on oak. He was working on a customer's boat, and the customer said no yard in Maine could do it by Sunday."

"He's lying," I said to the lobstermen's sons.

"He's not," said Ansel from the far side.

I turned my head.

He didn't look up from the nail.

"I was seventeen," he said. "I saw the hull. My father took me to see it."

Nobody said anything for a second.

Fern went on in a loud voice.

"Then Armand sat down on the keel, and he said, 'Now I'll never be rid of the damn thing,' and he gave it to the customer for the price of the wood."

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