Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [190]
I had just sold my third book and had enough in the bank I could do this, but Jeb had to turn his back on his bills for this job. Like always, it was good working with him again. He did the design and layout of what turned into a new kitchen and bathroom, a new floor frame and rear outside wall, and I went to work with him cutting and nailing and driving into place. Many days after we’d been working four or five hours already, the noon sun high over the Merrimack and the hardwoods on the other side, Pop would drive up in his Toyota with its handicapped controls, and he’d tap the horn and hold up a bag of Dunkin’ Donuts and a tray of coffees in Styrofoam cups. We’d walk out thirsty and hungry in our leather tool belts, sawdust in our hair and across our forearms. We’d thank him but say, “You just get up, writer boy? It’s lunchtime. Where’re the subs?”
He’d laugh, and we’d eat our doughnut lunch under the sun in front of Suzanne’s small new house.
Once a week or so, I’d swing by his place for a check for the lumberyard, and he’d write one out at the dining room table. One morning, he was finishing up praying with his rosary beads, something I didn’t know the first thing about. He looked up at me and said, “I was praying to my father.”
“Your real father?”
“Yep.”
“I didn’t know you could pray to dead people.”
“Oh yes, son. I talk to my daddy all the time.”
Over the years Pop had written and talked about him. I knew he’d been a surveyor and a good provider for his wife and two daughters and baby son. I knew he’d golfed every Saturday, then played cards with his friends. I knew he used to ridicule my father for being a dreamer, “All you’re good for is shooting Japs in the backyard.” I knew that Pop had joined the Marine Corps to prove to his own father he was a man. I knew that my grandfather had never told my father he loved him and my father had never said those three words back.
This is all I knew, and it wasn’t much.
ONE AFTERNOON, Pop pressed the button that activated the electric winch that lowered his wheelchair from its metal container bolted to his roof. He transferred to his wheelchair, and Jeb or I backed him to Suzanne’s door and pulled him into her house where we pushed aside tools and scraps of lumber and showed him our latest progress. He looked up at the vaulted ceiling we’d just framed in the kitchen, at the new skylight, a square of blue sky above. He said, “Y’all are doing holy work for your sister. This is holy work.”
IT WAS after eleven o’clock and I’d been working at Suzanne’s house since eight that morning. The sky was clear and the stars shone over the hat factory and the ice floes drifting down the Merrimack for Newburyport and the black Atlantic. Hard snow covered the ground, the tree branches bare and frozen, and when the wind picked up they sounded like dry bones knocking together. The following day I was flying to the West Coast to start a book tour for my new novel, a story I’d written about a woman who loses her father’s house to an Iranian colonel, a proud man who tells himself he always puts his family first. This had taken me four years to write. When I began it, Fontaine was pregnant with Austin. Now, two days before its publication, we had three kids. These had been the most joyous years of my life, but this book was shot through with bitterness and loss, and I was dreading the reviews.
Earlier in the day I had hung two doors and hadn’t gotten to the bathroom till sundown. It was a small space, but