The Loft Above the Shop
“Sure,” I said.
“Have you thought about talking to Kurt,” he said. “Not Jen. Kurt. Man to man.”
I had thought about it every hour since Wednesday. “Brody asked me not to make it a fight,” I said. “If I talk to Kurt, it’s a fight. I don’t know how to say it any other way.”
Dad nodded slowly. “My dad charged me board when I was seventeen,” he said. “Ten dollars a week. 1972. That was a lot of money.”
I looked at him. I had never heard this. “Grandpa did that?”
“He did,” Dad said. “We had a dairy, and the milk check was thin that year. He needed it, and I knew he needed it, and I paid it. That’s different, though.”
“How is it different?” I asked.
“Because he needed it,” Dad said. “And because he told me why, and he looked me in the eye when he asked. And because when the milk check came back up, he gave every dime of it back to me in a coffee can, and I bought my first truck with it.”
He crumpled up his sandwich paper and stood up and stretched his back. “Your boy isn’t paying because anybody needs it,” he said. “He’s paying because somebody wants him to feel it. That’s a different thing entirely.”
Weekend three, the inspector came. Dale was a big quiet man about my age who had played football against me in high school. He walked the framing with a flashlight and a tape measure and did not say much.
He checked the stair layout. We had planned a straight run along the side wall, thirty-six inches wide, with a seven-and-a-half-inch rise and a ten-inch tread. He nodded at that.
He checked the opening we had framed on the end wall for the egress window. Dad had cut through the steel siding himself with a nibbler, slow and clean, and framed in a header like he was building a house in 1985.
“Opening’s good,” Dale said, measuring. “Sill’s under forty-four. You’ve got your clear area. What are you using for separation from the shop?”
“Five-eighths Type X on the shop side,” I said. “Ceiling and the stair wall. Taped and mudded. Solid core door at the top of the stairs. The shop already has a bathroom on the ground floor, so he won’t need to go outside.”
He wrote that down. “Heat?”
“Electric baseboard, its own circuit,” I said. “I’m running it this week. Hardwired smoke and CO, interconnected, one up top, one at the bottom of the stairs.”
Dale looked at me, and then at my dad, and then up at the loft again. “This for Brody?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I said.
He nodded. He signed the framing card and stuck it on the post with a staple gun. On his way out, he stopped at the door and turned around.
“My stepdad made me pay rent too,” he said. “Junior year. It was a long year.” Then he got in his county pickup and drove off, and I stood there in the doorway with my mouth open, because I had never told him a thing.
I found out later Barb had told him. In a town of eighteen hundred people, that is how it goes. I wasn’t even mad.
The fourth weekend, we brought in a spray foam man from Little Falls to do the roof and the steel walls. You do not put fiberglass against bare steel in Minnesota unless you want it to rain inside your walls in January. Closed-cell foam, two inches, nineteen hundred dollars.