The Birdhouses Dad Sold by Noon

“No sir.”

“Well,” Dad said. He looked out the windshield again, at the stubble. “Your mother always said I’d put a hundred jobs on that girl if she let me. I guess I never needed to ask. She just took them.”

“Where are the birdhouses?”

“In the bed. Under the tarp.”

“All forty?”

“All forty. Three need new roofs. One chimney.”

“Get me home,” he said. “And get the wood glue.” We mended them at his kitchen table that night, the two of us under the yellow light, with newspaper spread out and a pair of bar clamps from the garage.

His hands shook. He held the clamp anyway. I cut the new roof boards on the table saw while he sat by the door and told me which angle, which grain, how much overhang to keep the rain off the hole.

He did not tell me I was doing it wrong. He told me what the board wanted. There is a difference.

At half past nine I set the last finished roof on the table and he looked at it a long time.

“That’ll do for a wren,” he said. I asked him if he wanted to come to the school and sell them.

He gave me a look like I had suggested he rob a bank. “In a wheelchair, in front of everybody?”

“In the sun, sitting down, which is more than I get.”

“Nobody will buy them from an old man.”

“They’ll buy them from you before they’ll buy them from me, Dad. You’re the only one who knows what they’re for.”

He worked his jaw. “What do we ask?” “Eighteen.” “Eighteen!” He laughed, which brought on a cough. “Jasper. Nobody pays eighteen dollars for a birdhouse.”

“The ones at the farm store are nine, and they’re plywood with a hole drilled in.”

“Twelve,” Dad said.

“Eighteen. Yours are tight.” He looked at me over the clamp for a long while, and then he did something I will not forget. He reached over and patted my hand, twice, the way you pat a horse that has done what you asked.

“Eighteen,” he said. “And I’ll tell them the bird.”