Eduardo's Arc

Chapter 9 of 60

Eduardo set the glass in the frame before noon. He pressed the putty in with his thumb and wiped the smear off with a rag. The pane held. He stepped back and looked at it and did not feel proud. He felt tired in a clean way. He sat down on the porch step with the rag still in his hand. He let himself think of her without steering away from it. Eight years. He counted them on the boards of the porch. The first year he had blamed her. The second year he had spent money he did not have. The third he had lost the buyers he had built for five years, because he had handed his contacts to a man who smiled at him and used them to look bigger. The old man at the feed store was the only one who still took his word after that. Eduardo had not understood why until now. His word had been the same as his work, and he had let another man carry both. He thought of her bare feet on the stone step that last night. He thought of the laugh he had used on her. He thought of the eight hundred dollars he had lost at dawn to prove her wrong. He had proved her right instead. Every year after had proved her right. He thought of what he had learned since. That anger did not have to move his hands. That a window could be measured and set in one day. That crying did not kill him. That saying you were right out loud to an empty room did not cost him anything he needed to keep. He thought of what he had felt. Shame, first, for a long time. Then a heat that wanted somewhere to go. Then a flat gray stretch where he drank and did not sleep. Then this. Whatever this was. A quiet that did not ask him to fix it. He looked at his house. The roof still sagged over the back room. A crack ran down the front wall past the door. The porch boards were sound where he had replaced them and soft where he had not. It was still a broken home. It was his. He said her name once, under his breath, the way you say a name you are giving back. Kiersten. Not to call her. To let her be where she was. He stood up. He folded the rag and put it on the rail. Tomorrow he would start on the roof. He would buy the shingles with cash and he would ask the old man at the feed store what he was paying for nails these days. He would earn his word back one small purchase at a time. He did not need her to see it. That was the part he had finally understood.