Drywall and Dust

I was twenty-eight that fall, and I want to get the ages out of the way up front because people always ask. Twenty-eight, newly single, and on my knees in a stranger's living room at ten at night, sanding a seam in joint compound while the dust settled on everything I owned, which at that point fit in two duffel bags. My girlfriend of three years had moved out in August. We met in grad school when I was twenty-five, and by the time it ended I had a degree I wasn't using, a job on a renovation crew that paid cash, and a spot on my friend Lucy's floor between her couch and a bookshelf. So that's the setup. It's not a sad story, exactly. But it starts sad.

The house was one of those half-gutted two stories on the edge of town, the kind the flip guys buy and then lose interest in. Sheets of drywall were stacked in the living room like a paper mill had died there. Tarps covered the kitchen floor because the real floor was gone. Upstairs there was one finished bedroom with a bare bulb on a pull chain and a mattress on the floor, which the crew used for naps. The whole place smelled like sawdust and primer, and after two months of working nights in houses like that, I mostly stopped noticing. That's the thing nobody tells you about a breakup. You stop noticing things. Rooms, smells, yourself.

So there I was, kneeling on the tarp with my sanding pole laid aside because this one seam needed hand work, when the front door opened and a guy walked in tracking mud across everything. Not a little mud. Boot prints, deep ones, a whole trail across the clean tarp like he was signing his name.

"Hey, you're walking mud all over that," I said, flat, not even turning around. I heard him stop. There was a pause, then the sound of him stepping back outside and doing the whole stomp-your-boots-off-on-the-porch routine, which, credit to him, was more than most of the guys on the crew would have done. I turned and there was a man in his late twenties standing in the doorway holding his boots by the laces in one hand, socks dark with wet, looking apologetic and a little sheepish about it.

"Aldo," he said. "Electrician. They told me to come do the rough-in tonight, something about the inspection moving up." He squinted at me. "Are there other people here, or is it just you and me in this big dark house?"

"Just me," I said. "Millie. I'm the mud you're tracking, basically. I did all that compound."

He laughed at that, an easy laugh, and set his boots by the door. He was taller than me, dark hair pushed back, forearms that come with the trade, and he had the specific tiredness I recognized, the kind you get from a week that started bad on Monday and stayed bad. I knew the type because I was the type.

He got to work and so did I, and for about an hour the house was just two people making separate noises in separate rooms. You'd be surprised how loud sanding is when it's the only sound. Every so often I'd hear his drill or him talking to himself under a breath, cursing at a stud that wasn't where the plans said. At some point I realized I was listening for his noises instead of working, which was embarrassing, so I went downstairs to check the front door seals and found my thermos on the windowsill where I'd left it.

He came down the stairs in his socks with his jacket already half on, and I held up the thermos like a question. "You want some? It's the good stuff, my boss doesn't know I take it."

"God, yes," he said, and that was the end of it. We went out to the front steps because there was nowhere to sit inside except drywall stacks, and the night had that clean cold snap to it that makes sitting outside feel like a decision. He sat one step below me so we were almost level, and we passed the thermos back and forth without much ceremony. His coffee mug technique was to drink like it owed him money.

We talked the way night shift people talk, meaning about nothing with feeling. He'd been subbing for a buddy for the week, the money was fine, the hours were stupid. Before that he'd been doing commercial work, which paid worse and had better radios. I told him about the crew, how I joined in September because after the breakup I couldn't stand my own apartment, except then I didn't have an apartment, so technically the plan had worked out worse than intended. He asked about it without prying, the way people do when they've been through their own version. He mentioned, kind of sideways, that his last serious thing had ended a while back and since then it had been a couple of hookups, nothing that stuck, and he said it like he was reporting the weather. Two years since the last one, he said, and then seemed surprised at himself for counting.

"That's a weird thing to know about you already," I said.

"You asked about my week," he said. "That's my week."

What we kept coming back to was the house itself. There's something about working in someone else's empty house at night that gets under your skin. You learn everything about people who aren't there. You know which bedroom faces the street, where they meant to put the outlets, what the old paint color was under the new one. You stand in the middle of their future living room and you know their house better than their friends do, and they'll never know you were there. Aldo said for him it was the closets, that he always wires the closet light last and it gives him a minute to think. I said for me it was the sanding, that you can't rush it, your hands learn the wall, and somewhere in hour three of that you start having thoughts you'd normally save for a long drive.

"I know things about these people," he said, nodding at the house behind us. "They want an outlet right there by the bed and I know they argue about the kitchen island because the mark on the floor moved twice."

"That's more than their friends know."

"Way more than their friends know." He took the thermos, drank, handed it back. Our fingers did the normal handoff thing and didn't do anything weird, but I noticed it anyway, which was also becoming my week.

Then he told me he was sleeping on a pullout couch at his sister's place, had been for going on a month, and that the bar under it finds your spine like it's got a grudge. He laughed when he said it but it was that bitter laugh you do when the joke is just true. And I told him I'd been on Lucy's floor since Labor Day, between the couch and the bookshelf, and that I'd stopped apologizing for the air mattress squeak. We both laughed at that, the same bitter familiar laugh, two adults in their late twenties sitting on a stranger's unfinished porch steps with work boots by the door and nowhere in particular to sleep. It should have been depressing. It was a little depressing. But it was also the first time in two months I'd sat next to someone who was in the same boat and not pretending to be rowing something nicer.

Neither of us said anything for a while after that. A car went by. The house behind us had that settled quiet that empty houses get around eleven, like it was sleeping even though nobody had ever lived there. I remember thinking the coffee was getting cold and not caring, and thinking his shoulder was about four inches from mine and measuring the distance without meaning to.

"Well," he said finally, and tipped the last of the coffee into the cap, and looked at the cap like it had asked him something. "Back to it? Or we could stand around being sad on this porch another ten minutes."

"Ten minutes," I said. "Then back to it."

He smiled at the cap. Inside, we went back to our separate rooms and our separate noises, and I sanded that seam better than I'd sanded anything in weeks.

We knocked out another hour after that, me sanding and him running the last of the rough-in through the kitchen ceiling, and by midnight the house had that deep quiet where every sound you make sounds borrowed. I came downstairs to rinse my rag in the utility sink and found him standing in the living room with a sheet of drywall balanced on one shoulder, squinting at the staircase like it had personally wronged him.

"You're still here," I said.

"So are you."

"Fair."

He tilted his head at the stack. "There's a sheet up there that needs to go in the upstairs hallway and my helper called out. You want to trade, half of that for ten minutes of you holding the other end?"

So that's how I ended up hauling drywall at midnight with an electrician I'd known for six hours. The sheet was heavier than it looked, or maybe I was tireder than I thought, and we took the stairs slow with him walking backward and me doing the loud breathing. We got it leaned against the hallway wall without killing either of us or the drywall, and he slapped the wall twice like it was a horse and said good work, and I said something about how I was going to feel that tomorrow in places I didn't know I had.

That's when I looked at the clock on my phone and did the math. The crew was due back at seven. Sanding takes a fresh brain or it takes ugly walls.

"Here's a thought," I said. "You've got the upstairs left to finish. I've got maybe an hour of touch-up sanding up there too. Stay late with me. We knock it out tonight and neither of us has to come back to this room before inspection."

He laughed. "You're trying to talk me into more work."

"I'm trying to talk us both into not doing it twice."

"Counteroffer," he said, holding up one finger. "I stay, I finish the wiring, and you owe me a beer. Because of the drywall. That was drywall carrying."

"That's extortion."

"That's a service fee."

I said fine, one beer, payable at a bar of his choosing, and he said he'd hold me to it, and then we both stood there a second in the hallway like two people who had just made a deal and were now out of things to negotiate. He went back down for his tools and I went up to the finished bedroom, the only room in the house that was actually done, and finished my last seam while he thumped around below me.

Around one in the morning we were both done. He flipped the breakers one at a time and every light in the house came on in sequence, room by room, like the house waking up, and I stood in the hallway watching it happen with dust in my hair and primer on my forearms. Then he killed them all again because there was no reason to leave them on, and that was somehow the funniest thing that had happened all week, a whole house lighting up for nobody.

We ended up in the finished bedroom because it was the only place to sit. There was a mattress on the floor, no frame, and a bare bulb on a pull chain, and a window with the plastic still on it. We sat on the edge of the mattress with our boots off and our backs against the wall, passing his thermos, because neither of us had a beer on us and the thermos was what we had. The house creaked its one creak every few minutes. The streetlight outside made a square on the far wall.

"That beer is running up interest," he said.

"It's been twenty minutes."

"Compound interest."

I told him he was a menace and he shrugged like he'd been called worse, and we sat there in the quiet the way you can only sit in a house at night when nobody owns it yet. I was aware of him the way you get aware of someone after a whole day of parallel work, the rhythm of their noises, the way he whistled two notes before he drilled. My ex used to say I fell for people's work rhythms before I fell for anything else about them. She wasn't wrong. I pushed that thought off the mattress, basically, swept it right over the edge.

Aldo was quiet a while, turning the thermos cap in his fingers. Then he said, kind of out of nowhere, "Can I tell you the thing that makes hookups weird for me? Since we're doing the late night honesty hour."

"Sure."

He looked at the window, not at me, which I appreciated, because it made it easier to hear. "I'm trans," he said. "Started transition at twenty-two. So seven years in, and it's mostly fine, except when it's a hookup and I have to have the conversation in the middle of the night, literally in the middle of it, and you can feel the person recalculating. Some of them are great about it. Some of them go weird and quiet. One guy, a couple years back, he was fine about it, actually, that one was fine, he just." He made a vague gesture. "Anyway. That's the weird thing. That's why it gets awkward. Not some big tragedy, just that part."

I thought about what to say, which took me about four seconds, which is a long time to be silent next to someone who just told you that. "Thanks for telling me," I said. "And for the record, I'm not recalculating anything."

"Maybe you're just tired."

"Maybe. But I was tired an hour ago and I was still sitting here."

He looked at me then, and the streetlight square was on the wall behind me so I couldn't see his face great, but I could see enough. He nodded, slow, like he was filing it somewhere.