A sample from
Tell Him Why
Renita Tillery had watched the young mason on the bank scaffold all summer, and on the day the notice gave him ten days left, she decided her husband was going to watch too.
The notice went up on the hoarding at a quarter past eight, and Renita read it from her own doorway before she had finished unlocking the shop.
It was a sheet of laminated paper zip-tied to the plywood at eye height, the way the crew posted everything: the permit, the hard-hat sign, the number to call if a brick came down on your car. Somebody had written on this one in black marker, in capitals that leaned to the right and got smaller toward the end because whoever wrote them had not planned the line.
SCAFFOLD STRIKE THU SEP 3.
She stood there with the key still in the lock and did the arithmetic the way she did spacing, without wanting to. Monday the twenty-fourth. Ten days, not counting the one she was standing in.
Then she went in, turned the sign on the door to OPEN, and propped the door with the iron doorstop shaped like a sleeping dog that had come with the building, because it was going to be ninety by two and the shop had one window unit and it was in the back office where nobody worked.
Tillery Sign & Letter was a long narrow room on the east side of the square, with a pressed-tin ceiling, a bench under the front window and a smell she had stopped noticing years ago and noticed again every August: mineral spirits, enamel, warm dust, the faint sweetness of the size she kept in a jar with a cloth over it. The church board for Grace Missionary was on the easel where she had left it Friday, the second coat of black dry and the white letters waiting. EVERY SUNDAY 10:30 ALL ARE WELCOME. She had argued with the deacon about the colon. She had won.
She tied her apron on over the green wrap dress, pushed her hair back with the wide cloth band, and set out her quills and the mahl stick and the little palette of white enamel, and for an hour she did not look across the street at all, which was a thing she noticed herself doing, and which was its own kind of looking.
At nine the crew's radio came on over there. At nine-thirty the mixer started. Somebody up top yelled for more mud, and somebody else yelled back a word the Grace Missionary deacon would not have approved of, and Renita laughed into her lettering and had to stop and lift the quill away until it passed.
She knew which voice was his. She had known that since June.
The old Merchants Bank faced her across the square: four stories of buff limestone with a cornice like the brim of a hat, empty since the bank folded into a bigger one out of Springfield, bought last year by people from Champaign who were going to make it apartments over a coffee place. They had money and a historic grant and an architect who used the word honest about stone. All summer the building had been wrapped in pipe scaffold and green mesh, and all summer three or four men had been up and down it raking out a hundred years of bad mortar and pointing it back with lime.
The incised name on the cornice was hers. MERCHANTS BANK, fourteen-inch Roman capitals cut into the stone in 1911 and gilded once, by somebody who had known what he was doing, and never touched again. The leaf had gone to a brown ghost in the bottom of each V. The architect had found her by asking at Halloran's who did the gold on the bakery window, and Doreen, who took his order without writing it down, had pointed out the window and across the square at Renita's shop.
So she had been up on that scaffold twice already this summer, once to look and once to test-patch the B, climbing the ladders between the lifts in work pants with her hair tied under a scarf, and both times Brody Haskett had been the one who came up behind her on the ladder, not touching her, close enough to catch her if she missed a rung.
She hadn't missed one. She had been aware, both times, of exactly how close.
By eleven he had his shirt off.
She did not decide to look. She lifted her head to rest her eyes, which was a thing a letterer was supposed to do every twenty minutes, and there he was on the third lift, at the north corner where the cornice turned, with his shirt hung over a scaffold rail and his back to the square.
He was broad through the back and the shoulders in a way that had nothing to do with a gym. It was the build of a man who carried block up ladders for a living. His skin had gone a deep, even brown all summer across his neck and his arms, and when he reached up to the joint above him and his work pants rode down an inch, there was a line at his waist where the brown stopped and he was pale underneath, white as the inside of a loaf. She had seen that line in June, faint. It was not faint now. It had taken all summer to get like that.
That was the thing about watching a man for a whole summer. You could tell the time by him.
He pulled a hawk of mortar close, loaded the pointing iron, pressed it into the joint and drew it, and did it again, and again, the same pressure every time, the same small turn of the wrist at the end. She had watched enough apprentice sign painters try to pull a straight line to know what it cost to make something look that easy. She watched until he stopped to drink from a jug, tipping his head back, and his throat moved, and then he lowered the jug and turned and looked down across the square, straight at her window.
Renita looked at the church board.
She put a white serif on the L in ALL with a hand that was perfectly steady, which pleased her. Then she sat back and let out a breath through her nose and said to the empty shop, "Forty-three years old," in the voice her mother had used about women who wore white after Labor Day.
He came across at ten past twelve.
She heard the door of his truck first, out where it was parked along the hoarding. He had put his shirt back on to cross the street, a gray T-shirt gone dark at the collar, and he stopped in her doorway the way he always did, as if the doorway were a line on a drawing and he needed telling he could cross it.
"Afternoon," he said. "Got your heights."
"Come in. Mind the dog."
He looked down at the iron doorstop and stepped over it with exaggerated care, which was a joke he had made in June and then kept making, and she laughed at it again, which she supposed was her joke.
He took his cap off when he came in. His hair was dark brown, almost black, short at the sides and long on top, and with the cap gone it fell forward over his forehead and he pushed it back with the flat of his hand. He had stubble already. He smelled of lime and sweat and the cold water he had splashed on his face at the truck, and there was a white crust of dried mortar across the backs of his knuckles that he would not have noticed.
He put a folded sheet of graph paper on the corner of her bench, well clear of the wet board.
"Jerry measured it Friday," he said. Jerry was the foreman, a voice she had heard all summer and a face she had met twice. "Top of the cornice is thirty-nine feet two from the sidewalk. Your letters sit at thirty-seven ten to the baseline. He did every letter, because he said you'd ask."
"I would have asked."
"That's what he said." The corner of his mouth went up. He had a chipped front tooth, a small clean corner gone off the left one, and when he smiled you saw it, and you could see too that he had stopped minding about it a long time ago. "He said a woman who argues with a deacon about a colon is going to want every letter."
She looked at the church board and then at him. "How does Jerry know about the colon?"
"Everybody knows about the colon. You told the deacon on the sidewalk. We were on the second lift."
She unfolded the sheet. Jerry's figures were small and square and neat, a height under every letter, the two words drawn out across the paper like the cornice itself. The H was an eighth higher than the C beside it. The stone had settled, a hundred and fifteen years, and nobody had cared until now.
"The joints round the letters," she said. "When did you point those?"
"Week ago Thursday."
"That's too new."
He nodded slowly, like she had passed something. "Lime's slow. It cures from the outside in. Takes in the air, goes back to stone, but it don't hurry. Your size goes on the face of the letters, though, not the joints."
"The size goes where the brush goes. If there's lime bloom on the stone the leaf won't hold. It'll look fine for a year and then come off in a sheet."
"So you want it washed."
"I want it washed and I want it dry and I want a week."
"You got eight days," he said. "Then we start dropping lifts."
He said it plainly, the way he said everything, but he was looking at her when he said it and he did not look away when he finished. That was the other thing she had learned about him over the summer. Most men, when they looked at a woman longer than they meant to, did it in pieces, a glance and then somewhere else and then back. Brody looked at her the way he pointed a joint: one long stroke, no hurry, all the way to the end.
He was looking at her now, in the shop, in daylight, with Grace Missionary's board between them. Not at the apron. At her. As though she was the thing that the whole hot slow summer had been about, and the bank and the lime and Jerry's numbers were things that had happened around the edges of it.
She was wearing the green wrap dress under the apron, the one that tied at the side, and it was close at the waist and then not close at all, and she was aware of that. She was aware that the apron strings were tied in a bow at the small of her back, and that he could see the bow, and that there was nothing at all stopping her from standing up.
She stayed sitting. She folded Jerry's sheet in half along the crease.
"Tuesday week," she said. "I'll lay the leaf on the first. So it wants washing this week, and the weekend to dry."
"I'll wash it for you. Tomorrow, first thing, before it gets hot."
"You don't have to do that."
"No," he agreed. He put his cap back on, and his hair went under it, and he looked younger with it on, which was not a help. "I'll do it anyhow. It's my wall."
"It's the bank's wall."
"Not till Thursday next," he said, and went out, and stepped over the iron dog with great care, and crossed the square without looking back, which was how she knew he knew she was watching.
She did not get much more done on the board.
She got the white onto ALL ARE and left WELCOME for the morning, and set the board on the drying rack and cleaned her quills in spirits and wiped them and laid them in the tray, and then she stood in the doorway with her arms folded and a damp rag over her shoulder and read the notice again.
SCAFFOLD STRIKE THU SEP 3.
Here was how she would have laid it out if a customer brought it to her. She would have told them they had too much weight on the left. She would have told them the date was the only thing that mattered and it was the smallest thing on the sheet.
It was the only thing that mattered.
She had been looking at him since June. She could say that much to herself, standing in her own doorway with the heat coming up off the bricks; she was not a woman who lied to herself about things she could see out of her own window. She had looked, and he had looked back, and it had been pleasant the way August was pleasant, something that happened to you if you sat still long enough. A woman could look at a young man on a scaffold all summer and it was nobody's business, not even hers.
But there was a date on it now.
And a date changed the shape of a thing. She knew that better than anyone. Every sign she had ever painted for a sale, a revival, a fish fry, a closing-down, had a date on it, and the date was what made people come.
So she built it the way she built a layout, from the bottom up, the strong line first.
It ended. That was the strong line. The scaffold came down on Thursday the third and his crew went on somewhere else, the way crews did. He would not be across the square in October. He would not be at Halloran's on a Saturday morning, or at the hardware store, or in the pew behind somebody's aunt. Nothing would be left over. Whatever she wanted, if she wanted it, it would be finished before the leaves turned, and the bank would have its name back in gold, and she would sit in her window in the fall and look across the square at a building with nobody on it.
It ended, so it was safe. That was the reason. It was a good reason, square and level, and she stood on it and found that it held her weight.
Then she put the next line on top of it, which was Paul.
End of sample. The story continues in the full edition.