My family laughed at my military rank, called me an embarrassment, and looked almost relieved when two police officers arrived to arrest me.

Chapter 25

October came, the way October does.

I had put in for the leave in June, before any of this, and it had been approved in July by a man who did not care what it was for, and so I found myself at thirty-eight years old with two weeks and no plan, standing in a rental car lot at the Denver airport at seven in the morning with a duffel bag and a jacket.

The mountains were already getting snow on the high ridges.

Tiffany met me at a diner off C-470 with two coffees and a folder.

“A folder,” I said. “You brought a folder.”

“It’s a shared document. I printed it.”

“Why.”

“Because you’re not on the shared document, because you never accept the invitations, because you have an email address from 2009.” She slid it across the table. “Roof. Contractor quotes. Three of them. Brad’s guy is the cheapest and the slowest. The other two are expensive and I don’t like either of them.”

I opened the folder.

It was, genuinely, a very good folder. Quotes, timelines, a rough budget, a column for what we could defer, a column for what we absolutely could not.

“Who did the budget?”

“I did.”

“Tiffany, this is better than half the staff work I’ve seen.”

She sat back and grinned into her coffee, which was the most Tiffany expression I had seen in weeks.

“Don’t tell Brad.”

“Why not?”

“Because he’ll say I told you and he’ll be right.”

Dad met us at the cabin at noon with a truck full of lumber that he had bought without asking either of us, which was Dad in a sentence, and which produced a ten-minute argument on the porch about who was paying for it that ended with Tiffany holding the receipt and Dad walking away saying he had to check the water heater.

The contractor came Thursday and pronounced the south slope “not as bad as it looks,” which is the phrase every contractor has used on every house since the beginning of time and which, Dad assured me, was as good as it was going to get.

We spent four days on the roof.

I learned things I did not know I wanted to know—how to lay a shingle course, how to flash a chimney, why the ridge cap matters. Dad learned that I could work a nail gun without flinching at the noise, which he found interesting for reasons he did not explain.

On the second day, on the roof, he asked me about my work.

Not in the way he had always asked before, which was a form of changing the subject. Actually asked. What it was, what I did, why the advisory group existed, what a colonel in a policy billet did with her day.

I told him.

He asked more questions. Some of them were naive. Two of them were, actually, quite good, and I told him so, and he looked pleased in a way that he immediately tried to hide by going to get a hammer.

On the third day, my mother arrived.

She brought a casserole and four kinds of cleaning products and spent six hours on the interior of that cabin, and when she finished, the windows actually let light through in a way I had not seen since I was a child. She also found, at the back of a shelf in the second bedroom, a box of my grandmother’s school photographs—class after class after class of fourth graders, 1971 through 2001, thirty years of children holding up construction-paper projects.

She sat down on the floor and went through all of them.

I sat down next to her.

“You didn’t know she kept these?”

“Vaguely.” She was still turning pages. “She talked about her students constantly. I used to think it was because she preferred them to us.”

“Did she?”

“No.” Mom held up a photograph—1994, a small boy with a bowl cut, holding a paper airplane. “She just liked being useful to children. It was simpler for her than being useful to us.”

I looked at her.

“That’s a very honest sentence, Mom.”

“I’ve had a lot of time in the car.”

We sat on the floor and looked through thirty years of my grandmother’s fourth graders, and Mom told me things about her that I had never heard—that Rosalind had wanted to be a doctor and could not afford the tuition; that she had taught in the same classroom for twenty-two years and had once driven forty minutes in a snowstorm to bring a forgotten lunch to a boy whose mother had just died.

At six o’clock, Tiffany came in and found us both on the floor with paper airplane photographs all over the rug and said, “Oh no, what did I miss,” and sat down.

That was a good day.

On the last evening of the two weeks, Dad and I sat on the porch after everyone else had gone inside.

He had a phone in his hand. He had had a phone in his hand every evening for two weeks, and every evening he had done the same thing—written something and not sent it, or sent something short, or just sat there looking at the contact page with the gallery listing on it.

In two weeks, they had exchanged eleven messages.

Short ones. Careful ones. Thomas had sent a photograph of a painting he was working on—a mountain ridge with a strip of light underneath the cloud, and it was, as Tiffany had said, genuinely good. Dad had sent back a photograph of the roof.

Thomas had replied: You’re doing it wrong.

Dad had replied: Come and do it better.

Thomas had not replied to that one. It had been four days.

“How’s it going?” I asked.

“Slow.”

“That’s not a complaint. I’m asking.”

Dad turned the phone over in his hands.

“He’s angry,” he said. “He doesn’t say it, but he is.”

“Of course he is.”

“I thought he’d be—” Dad stopped.

“You thought he’d be apologetic.”

“Yes.”

“Why would he be?”

My father sat with that for a while.

“Because I’ve spent forty years deciding he was the one who left,” he said finally.

“And?”

“And it turns out he thinks the same thing about me.”

I looked out at the dark.

“He probably thinks you stayed and stopped answering. Which is a way of leaving that takes longer.”

Dad laughed, one short note.

“That’s a cruel sentence.”

“It’s an accurate one.”

“Yes.” He put the phone in his pocket. “He said something on Tuesday I keep thinking about.”

“What?”

“He said the cabin doesn’t care who was right.” Dad looked at the shutters—newly scraped, primed, waiting for a color in the morning. “He said the cabin just wants a roof.”

We sat with that.

“He’s coming?” I asked.

“He hasn’t said.”

“Do you think he will?”

Dad was quiet for a long time.

“I think,” he said, “that he’s already picked out the paint.”