Eduardo's Arc

Chapter 15 of 60

By afternoon the sun sat hot on the roof, and Eduardo climbed down from the ladder with sawdust in his beard. The house looked worse in daylight than at dawn. Sagging roof. Cracked siding. Two windows still boarded with scrap wood. He set his hammer on the step and looked at it the way a man looks at a road he has to walk. He pulled the pencil stub from his shirt pocket and sat on the porch. The envelope from the wall was folded in his hand. He opened it and read his own list. No debts. No cards. No bottle. No woman I have not earned. No lying to myself. She is not the prize. He wanted to add one more line. He wanted to write her name and promise the whole house to her. His hand hovered. The old ache pushed up under his ribs. He loved her so much it still bent him. He put the pencil down. "That is the loud part," he said out loud. He sat with the ache instead of feeding it. He counted his breath the way he had learned. Three in. Six hold. Nine out. The porch creaked under him. A cracked board bowed where his boot pressed. He heard his own heart slow. He picked the pencil back up and wrote a different line. Build the man first. Then he folded the envelope and pinned it under a rock on the rail. He walked to the truck and took out the ledger he kept in the glove box. He had been avoiding it for weeks. He opened it on the tailgate and wrote the numbers he owed. The feed store. The bank. Two men in town he had stiffed on cards. He added them until the page was full. The total was worse than he had let himself think. He drove into town with the ledger on the seat. He went to the feed store first, because the old man there still shook his hand. He paid what he could in cash and signed a paper for the rest, a small amount every week from honest work. The old man read the paper twice and nodded once. "Your word," the old man said. "My word," Eduardo said. He drove to the bank next. Then to the two men. One took the money and said nothing. The other spat on the ground before he took it. Eduardo did not argue. He wrote each payment in the ledger and drove home before dark. He stood in front of the broken house. The roof still sagged. The windows were still boarded. But the ledger on the seat was open, and his name was on every line in his own hand. He went inside and slept without dreaming. In the morning he would climb the roof again. He had stopped trying to manifest the best version of himself. He had started paying for him.