The Porch Wood The Contractor Took

Then I knelt back down, and I turned up that same loose end board so Roger Haaland could see the WK with his own eyes, and I kept reading the ledger, because I did not have anything else to say and the numbers were saying it better than I could.

Cal Brandt broke before I got to the bottom of the second page.

He did not break mean. That is the part I did not expect. He sat down on his own sawhorse and put his face in his hands and his shoulders went.

And the whole sorry thing came out of him on that gravel, in front of Roger Haaland and me and God.

Cal had bid too many jobs that year. He had taken deposits on four houses and the lake deck all in one stretch, sure he could run them end to end.

Then his crew walked over wages he could not pay, because he had already spent the deposits chasing his own tail. He got behind on every one of them at once.

Roger Haaland, it turned out, was the client with the real money and the real patience running out. Roger had paid Cal a large sum up front and had told him, more than once, that he wanted premium decking and he wanted it by fall or he wanted his money back.

Cal did not have Roger’s money anymore. He had spent it on the houses. And he did not have the cash to buy premium oak decking to satisfy Roger.

But he had the key to a dead man’s barn, and four hundred board feet of the finest quartersawn white oak in the county, dried and ready, belonging to a widow he figured would never drive forty minutes to a lake she had no reason to visit.

So he robbed the one job to quiet the other. He took Walt’s oak to make Roger’s deck, meaning, he swore, to buy new oak and replace my stack before I ever noticed, once the lake money came in.

He kept the nine thousand because he was drowning and nine thousand was air.

I want to tell you I felt triumph, standing there while he came apart. I did not. I felt a tiredness that went all the way down.

Because here was not a monster. Here was a weak man who had made an ugly, cowardly choice, and chose the one person to rob who he thought was too broken to fight back.

Now here is where I have to tell you the part I am most glad of, and it is not the part where anybody got dragged into a courtroom.

I never once called a lawyer. I never called the sheriff. I will tell you honestly that I thought about both, sitting in my kitchen the night before.