Free The Talk-Funny Girl by Roland Merullo Page B

some of them in good condition but none especially pretty or well fitting. Almost the only new things I owned had been given to me by Aunt Elaine, a series of birthday and Christmas gifts sent in the mail—the backpack; the knit sweater and scarf; a yellow, blue, and red striped long-sleeved jersey; the warm pajamas—and they were treasures to me, gems marking a thin path through a landscape of the shabby and plain.
    On route to the transfer station, driving slowly with the full truck bed, Sands talked again about the work, and again I could sense that nervousness in him and it sucked away some of my own. He didn’t smoke and didn’t comment about the driving habits of the other people on the road. He had all his fingers. I looked at him only in quick glances, but I listened beyond the words. “Water damages a building, any building, even a stone one, and in this case fire and the explosion damaged it first and let the water in. But there’s some solid material there—I wouldn’t have bought it otherwise—and so the first step is to clear everything down to the foundation, and then to see if you can usesome of the damaged stuff. You need to have a foundation that’s level and plumb. Do you know what plumb is?”
    I shook my head. There was an image of a piece of fruit in it.
    “Plumb is when the sides of something go straight up from the earth. So the corners and sides of that foundation—we have to make sure they’re plumb and level.”
    “Okay. How for to do it, though?”
    “Good question. I’ll show you when we get back. With a tool called a level, that has small tubes with liquid and air bubbles in them. Or sometimes, if you need to check over a long distance, with a transit—which I don’t have—or a clear plastic hose with water in it, which I do. Water finds its level at each end of the tube.… Anyway, once we get to that point—where the foundation is in good shape—then we start laying the stone for the walls. Later, in order to get to the higher work at the tops of the walls and the roof, we’ll build wooden staging to stand on. So you’re going to learn carpentry skills, too. If you stay with it.” He looked at me, turned onto the gravel road that led to the dump. “Have any questions so far? Don’t be shy.”
    “I’m not for shy.”
    “Sure you are. Don’t be.”
    “Maybe you’re for shy,” I said, out of a hurt place in me, a place that didn’t want criticism or attention to flaws. I hadn’t meant to say it and was surprised to hear the words come out. Two mistakes now, I thought, the boots and this.
    He looked at me, turned in at the gate. “You’re right. I was shy as a kid. Still a little bit sometimes.”
    “Why for?”
    “Long story.”
    I focused on sitting up straight—it was something Pastor Schect insisted on—and trying to think before I spoke, but the man who seemed like a boy inside didn’t appear to be angry with me about the boots or the questions, and, as sometimes happened with Cindy or a teacher in school, I felt that I could step out of the circle I kept myselfin. I thought of it not as a circle exactly but as a wooden keg, like the kind you could still get pickles from at Boory’s. I stood in the middle of the keg, a naked girl, holding it up around me, putting words out over the edge of it, timidly, and waiting to see what response they brought. “How can you to know where what goes?”
    “What do you mean?”
    “Where to put.”
    “The stones, you mean?”
    I nodded, retreated, ducked part of the way back down inside the barrel.
    “I have blueprints. Right after I bought this place I spent a few days drawing them up with a friend of mine who’s an architect. You can’t just think about the outside of something. You have to consider where everything is going to be inside, from bathroom to altar, if we were going to have an altar, which we’re not.”
    “What kind of church would you make it then? For your house?”
    “My house is going to