Page 91 of This Orc’s Got Rizz

I am on the north slope with eleven courses to go and a nail apron on and a view of that whole gravel road from four hundred yards, and I stop working at four hundred yards and stay stopped.

She gets out. She has eleven pounds back on her and a duffel over one shoulder and she stands in the gravel with her hand up against the sun looking at a roof.

"You said ninety percent," she calls.

"Ninety-one."

"There's a man on it."

"Yes."

"Come down off the man, then."

I come down off the roof.

Twenty-eight rungs, and I take them properly, one at a time, three points on the ladder, because a man who breaks his own rules on a ladder in front of a woman has told her something about how he works. At the bottom I turn around and she is right there, closer than she has ever stood to me on flat ground with nothing on either of us but daylight, and she has to tip her head all the way back.

"Hi," she says.

"Hello."

Then neither of us does anything for about four seconds, which is a long time on a gravel drive.

"Okay," she says, "so I drove four hours and I had a whole thing prepared and it's gone, it's completely gone, I have nothing," and I put my hands under her arms and lift her off the ground and she comes up light as a bundle of lath, and her arms go around my neck, and she holds on with her face in the side of my throat and her boots eleven inches off the gravel and she does not say one more word for a while.

We work until six, because the ridge cap has to go on before weather.

She goes up the ladder. This is the arrangement she proposes in the first ninety seconds and defends for four full minutes, and it comes down to arithmetic in the end, which is the only argument I lose to: she weighs a hundred and forty and I weigh two hundred and ninety, and the north slope decking has two rafters in it I have concerns about.

So she goes up and I hand up shingle, five bundles, one at a time, from the ground, straight over my head to the eave, and she takes them off my hands like a person taking a tray.

She nails badly for eleven minutes and then she nails correctly.

That is what she does now. That is what six days alone at the north site put in her, and it is unglamorous and it is real and it is the single most attractive thing I have ever had happen in a driveway.

At four o'clock she hangs the garland.

Nine feet of alder curls and stripped-bark stars, carried four hundred miles in a duffel with four shirts, strung along the ladder that leans against the open studs on the west side of my grandmother's kitchen.

"There," she says. "Now it's a house."

"It has been a house for a hundred and ten years."

"It's a house with garland, Ghorlan."

The kitchen at nine at night has no wall on the west side.

There is polyethylene stapled over the opening and it moves in and out with the air off the creek like a thing breathing. There is a stack of cedar shingle in the middle of the floor, waist high on her. There is the ladder, and the garland, and the new sill under the window with the scarf joint at the east end, pegged, planed flush, the color of butter against six-year-old gray.

There is a chicken carcass on the table and two plates and a pie tin with about a third of a pie left in it.

She has her boots off and her feet up on the second rung of the ladder and a glass of my grandmother's blackberry wine in one hand, and there is no lens anywhere in this room, and nothing running, and no clock on any part of it.

"So," she says. "The thing."

"Yes."

"The long thing you couldn't say in a field."