Punch List

The thing Nic would remember afterwards, and go on remembering at four in the morning for weeks, was how ordinary the light was.

At twenty to five on the last Friday in September the reading room on the second floor of the Lawndale branch was full of it. The west windows had been stripped of their protection film that morning and the sun came through them low and flat and orange across a bare concrete subfloor, and the new ceiling grid hung overhead in a white lattice with the sky still showing through half of it, and the whole room looked, briefly, like a rendering. Dust turning in the light. Two men on a scissor lift at the far end doing something unhurried with a duct. It looked like a building that was nearly finished, which it was not, and Nic had been in this trade nineteen years and knew better than to believe a room that was flattering itself.

He had his notebook out. Paper, spiral-bound, the same brand since he was twenty, because a phone screen goes dark while you are holding a ladder for somebody and paper does not. Item forty-one of the ceiling close-out. He wrote the number of a hanger location and drew a small square beside it and did not fill the square in.

Across the room Wit Sobczak had a section of grid tee up under a beam with one arm over his head, checking a line nobody had asked him to check. Three years Nic had known him — three, out of the eleven the man had been at this firm, because Wit had spent the first eight of them out on the Midwest jobs and had only come onto Nic's projects when the field team was pulled back into the office. Three years of finding reasons to be at whatever end of a room the man was in, and he had not, in all that time, worked out how to want it less.

"Nic." Sheree Kimbrough had come up the stairs without him hearing it, which she always did, in boots, over concrete. She had her half-glasses pushed up into a headwrap the color of a brick and her daily report book under her arm with a pencil in the spiral. "You want to talk about the light."

"I want to finish the grid."

"That's not what I said." She was not looking at him. She was looking past him at the west windows, at the angle of the orange on the floor, measuring it the way she measured everything, with her face. She was five foot four and had run this crew thirteen years and lived four blocks from where she was standing, and she did not raise her voice, ever, because a voice that carries does not need to be raised.

"Say it," he said.

"We've got maybe forty minutes of anything you'd want to sign your name to. After that we've got string lights and a man's eyes. Grid work you do in daylight or you do twice." She shifted the report book to her other arm. "I'd rather have it Monday. Monday I've got the whole morning and the sun on that wall, and I've got the same six people because I'm not letting any of them go anywhere. Monday it's an hour and it's right."

There it was, in the room, out loud, in front of two of her carpenters and a woman from the mechanical sub who had stopped pretending not to listen.

And there was a gap after it. Nic would think about the gap later too. It was about four seconds long, and it was not silence exactly — the scissor lift beeped somewhere behind him, a saw went on and stopped down on the ground floor — but it was room. There was room in it for him to say: Monday, then. That was all it needed. Two words, and everyone in the building went home to their Friday, and Sheree got her daylight, and the item got closed properly instead of adequately, and no part of the schedule he carried in his head would have moved by so much as a day. He knew that. He knew it the way you know your own phone number. He had done the arithmetic on the stairs coming up, twice, once honestly.

Because the honest version was: the grid could wait, and Wit's van was parked on Ogden with a permit hanging in the windshield, and if Nic said Monday then Wit put his tape back on his belt and drove home to Avondale at five o'clock like a man with a life, and Nic drove north alone.

He looked at his notebook instead of at her.

"We close the grid tonight," he said. "The set goes over to Marbry at the branch on Monday — and the man reads a drawing, whatever else he is — and I'd rather hand it to him closed than nearly."

Sheree let that sit for a second. She had a way of receiving a bad decision that gave you every opportunity to withdraw it, and no encouragement whatsoever.

"Your call," she said.

"Sheree—"

"It's your call, Nic. I'm not fighting you on your own job." She took the pencil out of the spiral and put it behind her ear, which was what she did when a conversation was over and work was starting. "I'll get you the ladders. You'll want the eight-footer at the north bay because the lift can't get past the column."

She went back down the stairs. Somewhere below her the saw started again, and did not stop.

Nic stood in the orange light and counted, because counting was what he had instead of a nervous habit. Six of Sheree's people. The two on the lift. The mechanical sub's inspector. Himself. And Wit, still over at the north bay with the tee up over his head, like a man checking a card he did not believe.

Eleven. He had just kept eleven people ninety minutes past the hour on a Friday, and nine of them did not work for him and one of them had told him not to.

He wrote nothing in the notebook about that.

"You're doing the face," Wit said, when Nic got to him.

"I don't have a face."

"You have one face. It's the one where you've decided something and you're waiting to see who's going to be an issue about it." Wit let the tee down and rolled his shoulder. He was six foot and built out of climbing things, long through the back, forearms marked up at the wrists where sleeves stopped being any use, and the last hour of sun had come up under the brim of nothing at all and put his eyes somewhere between gray and the concrete. "Was it Sheree? It was Sheree. She's right, you know."

"She usually is."

"That's not a defense, that's a character reference." Wit grinned at him. It was a fast, unserious thing that he did to about forty people a day, and it went through Nic exactly the way it always did. "Say the words. 'Sheree was right and I'm doing it anyway.'"

"Sheree was right," Nic said, "and we're doing it anyway."

"There he is." Wit picked up the tee again. "Fine. Forty-one to fifty-two, north bay, and then the two hangers over where the stack is going, and then you buy me something out of a machine."

"There's no machine."

"There's a machine in the staff room. I've been visiting it. It has a bag of something orange in it that has been in there since the Obama administration and I'm going to eat it in front of you."

"Wit."

"Boss."

Nic did not say don't call me that, because it had stopped working in the first month, and because there was a version of his own voice that came out when he tried and he did not like the sound of it. He crouched and steadied the foot of the ladder while Sheree's man set it and leveled it, and Wit went up it the way he went up everything, without ceremony, three rungs at a time, a pencil in his teeth and a laser in his back pocket and the ladder not moving at all under him.

That was the thing about Wit Sobczak, and Nic had heard three different senior people on the sixteenth floor say a version of it. You could ask him for anything. Punch lists nobody else would take, a Saturday in a plant room in Elgin, a set walked twice because a consultant had a feeling. He said yes with a joke on top of it and then he did it properly, and everybody in that office had built some part of their week around the fact that he had never once said no, and not one of them — Nic included, Nic first — had ever asked why a grown man might be like that.

They worked. The light went the way light goes at the end of September, all at once and then not at all: for twenty minutes the room was gold and workable, and then the sun got down behind the three-flats across Ogden and the room turned the color of dishwater and somebody swore, quietly, over by the lift.

"String lights," Sheree said from the stairs, and two of her people went and got them, and the room came back in patches. Yellow pools on the subfloor. Long shadows off the columns. The grid overhead went from a white lattice to a dark one with the string bulbs shining off the underside of it, and Nic stood under item forty-nine with his notebook and understood in a flat, uninteresting way that he was now looking at exactly the thing she had told him he would be looking at.

At ten past six she came and stood next to him with the report book open on her forearm.

"How many left?"

"Three."

"Three," she said, and wrote something. Not a comment. Just the pencil moving, unhurried, the same as every evening of her working life, in duplicate, because a job that goes wrong goes wrong six months later in a room she is not invited to.

"Sheree."

"Mm."

"Put it in there that you said Monday."

She looked up at him then. Half-glasses coming down off the headwrap and onto her nose, and something in her face that he could not name.

"I was going to," she said.

At twenty past six Wit was at the top of the eight-footer at the north bay, one hand on a hanger wire, checking the last of it.

There was nothing wrong. That was what Nic could never get past afterwards. There was no wind, because they were inside; the ladder was on flat concrete and Sheree's man had leveled it and Nic had watched him do it; the string lights were adequate; nobody was rushing. Wit reached out about eight inches further to the left than he had reached the last four times, to put two fingers on the tee and see whether it was seated, and said, "Yeah, that's your gap, that's not a—"

And the sound was very small. That was the other thing. It was one clean tock of aluminum against steel and then a half-second in which the whole room stopped, and Nic — who was four feet away with a pencil in his hand — saw a grown man go off a ladder and had all the time in the world in which to do nothing at all.

Wit landed on his left foot.

He landed the way you land when your body has decided it is going to get away with this, upright and reaching, and his heel took the whole of him from six feet onto bare concrete, and the noise it made was not loud either. Then he went down sideways and sat, hard, and put both hands flat on the subfloor behind him, and did not shout.

"Don't move," Nic said.

He was already there. He did not remember crossing. He went down onto both knees on the concrete beside him and got one hand under the ankle and one on the shin and held them still, and Wit's face had gone the color of the dust and his mouth was open and no sound was coming out of it, which was worse than any sound.

"Don't move. Wit. Look at me. Don't move that foot."

"'M fine."

"Sheree!" Nic did not raise his voice. He put it across the room the way she did, flat and carrying. "Ambulance. Now. Second floor, north stair, tell them we've got a fall from about six feet, conscious, breathing, left foot." He heard her say two words to somebody and start dialling before he had finished. "Wit. Wit. Stay with me. Don't put weight on it, don't test it, don't be brave, I'm going to hold it still and you're going to let me."

Wit's breath came back in and went out again, ragged and long, and then he laughed — one syllable, no air behind it, all teeth.

"Sheree wanted Monday," he said.

"I know."

"You're going to have to write that up."

"I know," Nic said. His hands were completely steady. His voice was level and warm and unhurried, the good voice, the one he could produce in any room on earth, and it went on producing calm sentences at eight-second intervals for the time it took the ambulance to come up Ogden. Nobody in that building, kneeling or standing, would have said afterwards that Dominic Vitale had been anything other than the steadiest man on the floor.

Under his collar, where he could not see it and nobody mentioned it, the heat had come up his throat and stayed there.

End of sample. The story continues in the full edition.

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