Free Hammer Head: The Making of a Carpenter by Nina MacLaughlin Page A

neighbor came out the door, a tall, bearded middle-aged dad. I remembered seeing him in tears on the sidewalk one summer afternoon a few years ago, a leash in his hand, the day the family’s two-year-old golden retriever had died. “Her heart just stopped,” he said, sniffling.
    He recognized me as I walked by. “Long time no see,” he said with a wave. “How’s the newspaper biz?”
    My self-satisfaction was blown away like a pile of sawdust in a wind. I fumbled and stuttered. “Oh, you know, I actually left my job at the paper. I’m still freelancing, but I’m working as an assistant to a carpenter, and we were just working around the corner, building this wall over at the café, and so it’s sort of this new life and—” Blood pressed against the skin of my cheeks as I somersaulted through a hands-in-the-air explanation, as though I didn’t quite believe what I was saying myself. I could sense his amusement.
    “Well that’s pretty cool. Where’s your tool belt?”
    His wife came out then, too, pretty in a northern California way, no makeup, thick hair, smooth skin, athletic sandals. She had a voice that reminded me of quilts.
    “Our old neighbor is banging nails for a living now,” he told her.
    I laughed nervously. “Well, sort of.”
    We talked on the sidewalk by a ginkgo tree for a few more minutes before I excused myself. I continued down my old road, past the apartment building that looked like a ship, past the small playground, past the house that always had a bunch of bikes tangled in a heap by the porch, past my old apartment where our landlady had planted some flowers in the mulchy space next to the stoop. I’d left the café thinking, Look at that, we did that! But walking down my old street, I was reminded again of what I was and wasn’t. It felt like a nervous charade. Hearing myself talk to my neighbor, I sounded unconvinced of any of it, even to myself.
    So I went back to peek inside the café, to remind myself that the wall was real—and that we had built it. It was still standing. I wanted to go in and tap on it, to give it a little kick. Building it was steadying. The sense of permanence, strength, and control it gave was unexpected and welcome, especially against the shifting and question marks taking place in my own life. There was space; we divided it.
    I looked at the café’s website not long after we’d finished up. They’d posted photographs of the progress of the work. People left comments. “Better before the wall.” “I understand why they did it, but I wish they hadn’t.” “Food’s the same, who cares about the wall?”
    T here were other walls to care about. A few weeks later, a job took us to a big house in Brookline, a rich suburb west of Boston. The couple who owned the place were Russian and had a young son. I didn’t meet the husband, but the wife was thin in a nervous way, and their son had a grayish pallor. And though their house was large, the rooms were almost empty: a couch and a table in one room, a lone chair in another in what might’ve been a dining room. Our voices and hammerbangs echoed off the floors. We were there to repair a rotting bay window at the back of the house.
    I stood on the backyard grass and watched as Mary, up on a ladder, about fifteen feet off the ground, pried pieces of shingle and molding off the house with a big blue crowbar. In these first months I spent a lot of time this way, watching Mary work. I fetched, chopped, lugged, and watched. And there was always cleaning up to do. Despite the mess in Mary’s basement workshop and the chaotic state of her van, she was a relentless tidier of her jobsites. We spent half an hour or more at the end of every day, after the last cut had been made, the last nail hammered in, sweeping, vacuuming, organizing, loading tools, making neat stacks of wood if we were returning the next day, leaving things cleaner than when we started if we weren’t.
    At the Russians’, I stood by as Mary