The Squad That Rebuilt His Ramp

Preston did not stay to hear all of it. He had already gone back inside.

He came out again around four, when most of the trucks were loading up to leave, and he crossed the yard to where Marcus sat at the bottom of his own new ramp, running a hand along the fresh cedar rail the way a man checks a thing is real.

“I owe you an apology,” Preston said. He did not look at me. He looked at Marcus, which I respected more than I expected to. “I was thinking about my house. I wasn’t thinking about yours.”

Marcus did not make him work for it, and he did not let him off easy either, which is its own kind of mercy. “You thought about a number on a sheet of paper,” Marcus said. “I lost my legs for people, Preston. That’s the only kind of value I ever learned to add up. You’re welcome to come to the next one of these. We have a lot of them. Somebody’s always rebuilding something.”

Preston Gage did not say much after that. But he came out with a pitcher of lemonade for the men still loading trucks, and he carried two sawhorses back to Jerry’s trailer himself, and if that is not exactly repentance, I think it is close enough kin to it that most anyone would recognize the family resemblance.

I will tell you plainly that I do not know if Preston Gage has become a different man. I only know what I watched him do on one Saturday afternoon, which is more than I can say I watched him do in the four months before it. Wilma, who has outlived two husbands and has opinions to match, told me later she gives it fifty-fifty whether he lasts another year on Larkspur Court before he sells and moves somewhere with less history in the dirt. I told her I did not much care either way, as long as whoever buys that house understands what the ramp next door means before they ever think to complain about it.

Gunny Ortiz was the last to leave. He stood with Marcus a long while at the base of the ramp after the street had gone quiet again, two men who had carried each other, literally once and in every way since, and I heard him say, low, “Teddy would’ve liked this crew today.”

“Teddy would’ve been running that chop saw and bragging the whole time,” Marcus said, and they both laughed the particular laugh men have when a joke is really a way of saying a name out loud without breaking.