The Tax Bill I Mailed My Stepson

The shed

Becky was in that shed for a long time. Long enough that I went to the door to see if she had found a snake.

She was sitting on Hank’s stool at his workbench. She had a green spiral notebook open in her lap, the kind they sell for a dollar at back-to-school time.

There was a manila envelope of photographs on the bench beside her.

“I was looking for the life jackets,” she said. Her voice was thick. “This was on top of them.”

It was Hank’s building notebook from 2006. I had not seen it in years.

I did not even know he still had it. He drew everything in it first: the footings, the rafters, the porch, the dock.

Every page had a little drawing and a list of measurements in his square pipefitter handwriting. And at the bottom of every single page, in the corner, he had written two words: “for Kristi.”

The page for the kitchen said “for Kristi.” The page for the septic said “for Kristi.”

The page for the dock said “for Kristi” and then, underneath it, “she wants it long enough to sit at the end and not hear the road.”

I had to sit down on an upturned bucket. I had not cried in front of anyone since the funeral, and I cried in front of my stepson’s wife in a shed that smelled like gasoline and fishing line.

Becky opened the envelope of photographs. There I was at thirty-three, on that first roof, in a ball cap with a hammer in my hand and a mouthful of nails.

There I was framing the back bedroom wall. There I was, filthy, asleep on a stack of plywood.

“Keith told me you never liked it up here,” Becky said. “His mom always said you’d sell it the day Hank died. He believed it his whole life. I believed it too, because he did.”

She held up the photo of me on the roof. “You built this.”

“We built it,” I said. “Hank and me. And Dale, and Dale’s nephew, and a cement mixer Hank cussed at.”

Becky put the photographs back in the envelope very carefully, like they were eggs. She stood up.

She took her phone out of her back pocket and walked out to the end of the dock, where Brody was casting, and I watched her make a phone call I could not hear.

She talked for a long time. She did not raise her voice that I could see. When she came back, she said, “He’s coming up next Saturday. He’s taking the day off.”

“Becky, he never takes Saturdays.”

“He is this one,” she said.