Renovations and Reckless Choices

Samson Ruiz was thirty-five years old, and on a Saturday morning in April he stood in the middle of his own living room holding a drywall knife and wondering when exactly he had become a construction worker.

He was a designer by trade. He had a degree, a portfolio, a chair with actual lumbar support at an actual firm. But three years ago he and his wife Carmen had bought the downhill half of a duplex in a neighborhood where the coffee shops outnumbered the parking spots, and they had decided to renovate it themselves. Everyone told them it would take a year. Two, if they were being honest with themselves.

Three years later, the kitchen was done. One bathroom was done. The living room was a construction site with a couch in it, and the couch had a fine layer of white dust on it no matter how many times Carmen wiped it off.

"Remind me why we didn't just hire someone," Samson said to the empty room. The empty room did not answer, which was about par for the conversation.

He looked down at himself. He was wearing jeans that had once been expensive, a birthday gift from Carmen back when he still cared about denim. They were now mostly white. Not fashion white. Construction dust white, the kind that gets into the fabric and never leaves, like a witness protection program for pants.

At thirty-five he felt every one of those years in his lower back, which had started making announcements whenever he bent over a sheet of drywall. He remembered being twenty-six, staying out until two in the morning, coming to work hangover-free for no reason other than youth. Now a weekend of hanging board required ibuprofen, a stretch routine, and a pep talk.

Carmen came in from the backyard with two mugs of coffee. She was thirty-three, an illustrator who worked from home, which meant she had been breathing drywall dust even longer than he had. She had her hair tied up with what looked like a paintbrush stuck through it. Samson thought that was unfairly charming.

"Our neighbors are coming at ten," she said, handing him a mug. "Bert texted. He's bringing his nail gun."

"An actual adult with an actual nail gun," Samson said. "Bless that man."

"Inez is coming too. She's bringing pastries from the bakery."

"So we're getting skilled labor and carbs." He took a sip. "This is the best day this room has ever had."

* * *

The Olivers lived in the other half of the duplex, on the uphill side. Bert was a carpenter, thirty-eight, big hands, quiet the way people are quiet when they're good at something and don't need to prove it. He'd met Inez when she catered a job site, dated her two years, married her. Inez was thirty-one and ran a bakery six blocks away, which meant the whole street smelled like bread on Thursdays and nobody complained about it, ever.

They came through the side gate at ten sharp. Bert had his tool belt on like other men wear wristwatches. Inez carried two bakery boxes and wore jeans and a t-shirt that had already survived, judging by the stains, at least one prior renovation.

"Morning," Bert said. "Where do you want me?"

"Living room ceiling," Samson said. "If the ceiling goes up, my self-respect goes up with it."

Inez set the boxes on the sawhorses and looked Samson up and down. Her eyes stopped at his jeans and she laughed, not mean, just delighted.

"Oh my god," she said. "Are those designer jeans?"

"They were," Samson said. "In a past life."

"Samson, those are forty percent spackle." She came closer and squinted at the knee. "That's not even from this project. That's old spackle. You've got vintage spackle."

"It's a patina," Samson said. "Very high-end. Very artisanal."

"You look like a scarecrow that lost a fight with a cake." She wiped her hands on her shirt and stuck one out. "Inez. We've met, like, nine times, but I feel like we should reintroduce ourselves since you're now mostly drywall compound."

"Samson," he said, shaking it. "Dusty designer. Pleased to meet you."

Carmen came in from the kitchen and Inez turned on her. "Carmen. Your husband has the worst pants I have ever seen in my life. And I work with flour at five in the morning. I know what ruined clothes look like."

"He's very proud of them," Carmen said. "He calls them his working jeans. He said that with a straight face last week."

"They're comfortable," Samson said.

"They're a health hazard," Inez said. "If you fall, nobody can tell where you're bleeding."

Bert, meanwhile, had already walked the room, tapped two studs with a knuckle, and plugged in his nail gun, all without saying a word. He looked at the ceiling joists the way other people look at menus.

"You've got a joist crown problem," he said. "That's why your seams are cracking. We go perpendicular first, then it'll lay flat."

"Perpendicular first," Samson repeated, as if he had known that.

"You didn't know that," Bert said. Not unkind. Just true.

"No," Samson admitted. "I did not know that."

"That's why I'm here." Bert picked up a sheet of drywall like it was a pizza box. Samson hated him a little and loved him a lot, in the same second, for the same reason.

* * *

They worked through the morning. Bert ran the nail gun. Samson measured and cut, which was the job he was least bad at. Carmen and Inez carried sheets and swept and, once the first ceiling run went up, stood back and admired it loudly, because somebody had to be the pep squad and they were both overqualified.

"Look at that," Inez said, hands on her hips. "A ceiling. You people have a ceiling."

"We always technically had one," Carmen said.

"Technically. That's doing a lot of work in that sentence."

By noon the sweat was real and the dust was everywhere, including in places dust had no business reaching. Samson climbed down his ladder for a water break and found Inez holding out a coffee refill instead.

"You look like you need this more than water," she said.

"I need a new spine, but this will do."

She leaned against the sawhorse and watched Bert and Carmen wrestle a sheet into place overhead. Carmen was directing. Bert was following directions, which Samson had learned was a sign of either great wisdom or great patience.

"Your wife's got a good eye," Inez said. "She pointed out that the last seam was drifting. She was right, too."

"She's got the eye in the family. I've got the dust."

"You've got the pants, anyway." Inez grinned at him. There was something in the grin that Samson noticed and then deliberately did not think about, the way you don't think about a sound at night until it stops. "So how long you two been at this place?"

"Three years. Bought it when I was thirty-two. Carmen was thirty." He drank the coffee. It was good, which surprised him until he remembered where she worked. "We were young and stupid."

"You're still young," Inez said. "You're dusty, but dusty is fixable."

"Easy for you to say. You smell like cinnamon." Which was true; the bakery clung to her, faintly, under the sawdust.

"Smell like cinnamon and own a nail-gun neighbor. I'm living my best life." She looked up at the ceiling, at Carmen laughing at something Bert said while he held the sheet steady. "Bert likes this, you know. He talks about it all week. 'Samson's got the crown problem, I showed him the perpendicular trick.' He's never this chatty about anything."

Samson watched his wife up on the stepladder, hair coming loose, flour-white at the elbows, pointing at a seam with the confidence of a woman who had never once in her life held a drywall knife. He realized he could not remember the last time he had seen her laugh like that in this room. This room had mostly produced sighs.

"Hey," he called up. "You're enjoying this way too much."

"I'm allowed," Carmen called back. "I'm the project manager. You're the labor."

"She's not wrong," Bert said.

"Nobody asked you, nail gun."

Inez laughed and bumped his shoulder with hers. "See, this is why we're helping. You guys are fun. We've been married eleven years, Samson. Fun takes scheduling now. This is scheduled fun. This is fun with a nail gun and free pastries." She straightened up. "Speaking of which, lunch. Carmen, get down here, I've got the good box open and I'm not saving the almond ones for polite people."

Carmen climbed down and the four of them sat on sawhorses and paint buckets in a room with half a ceiling, eating almond croissants out of a bakery box like it was a banquet.

Samson looked around at the dust and the drywall and the three other people and thought, for the first time in months, that the room did not feel like a failed project. It felt like a Saturday.

He did not know yet that by Sunday night he would remember this particular croissant for a very long time. That's the trouble with Saturdays. You never get the footnote until later.

After lunch Bert declared that the next hour was cabinet hour, because the base cabinets had been sitting in the garage for two months and he was tired of parking his truck around them. This was how Bert expressed emotion. Samson had started to understand that.

The cabinets were flat-packed disasters, four boxes of engineered wood and tiny cam locks, and they needed a wall measured down to the millimeter before anyone could commit to anything. Samson took the tape measure. Inez took the other end, because that was how tape measures worked, and Bert went out to the truck for his level.

"So you hold the hook on the mark," Samson said, "and I pull."

"I have used a tape measure, Samson. I own a bakery. I measure things all day."

"Flour is not millimeters."

"You'd be surprised."

He pulled the tape across the wall. The room was narrow. The thing about duplexes was that they were built by people in 1948 who assumed nobody would ever own a stand mixer or hold any personal views. So when Inez stepped in to press the hook flat against the baseboard, she was close. Closer than the job required. Her shoulder was against his arm and it stayed there while he read the number.

"Forty-two and three-eighths," he said.

"You're sure?"

"I'm looking right at it."

"Write it down before your hands forget."

He wrote it down. Her shoulder did not move the whole time. Neither did his arm, which was doing more work than an arm should have to do, holding still on purpose, as a man would who pretended he hadn't noticed weather. She smelled like cinnamon and drywall dust, and that was the only smell he let himself notice. He noticed the rest of it anyway. The warmth of her through two shirts. The fact that she did not shift her weight away, not once, not even when the measurement was done and there was no reason left on earth to be touching him.

"Got it?" she asked.

"Got it."

She stepped back then, slow, and he looked up and caught Carmen across the room. Carmen was standing by the paint buckets with a broom in her hands like she'd forgotten it was there, and she was watching the two of them, and she was smiling. Not a worried smile. Not a tight one. The kind of smile she wore when she'd guessed a plot point early in a movie and was enjoying being right.

Samson's first instinct was to explain. His second instinct, arriving fast on the heels of the first, was that there was nothing to explain. He had measured a wall. A woman had stood near him. His wife was smiling. He wrote forty-two and three-eighths on the wall in pencil, which was the job, and tried to remember what the other thing had felt like, which was not the job.

Bert came back in with the level and squinted at the pencil mark. "Forty-two and three-eighths. Good." He held the level against the wall and frowned at the bubble like it owed him money.

* * *

It was Carmen who called the beer break. That mattered, Samson noted later. Carmen, who could smell a deadline through a closed door, stood up from the paint bucket she'd been using as a stool and said, "All right, this has become a job. Somebody hand me a beer before it stays one."

"Back porch," Inez said immediately, in the tone of a woman who had been waiting all morning to say it.

The back porch was a concrete slab with two plastic chairs and a view of a fence that needed restaining. Samson brought out four bottles from the kitchen fridge, which was the one finished thing in the whole half of the duplex and therefore the best thing. The afternoon was doing that April thing where it pretends to be warm and then reminds you it's lying. Nobody went inside for a jacket.

Bert took his beer and sat on the slab itself, back against the house, which seemed like a carpenter thing to do. Knees up. He drank half of it in one go.

"That ceiling's going to look good," he said.

"You've said that four times," Inez told him.

"Because it's true four times."

Carmen dropped into the plastic chair beside Samson and put her feet up on an empty bucket. There was white dust in her hairline and a smear of spackle along one forearm and she looked, Samson thought, better than she had in months. Happier. Sweat and sunshine and somebody else's nail gun agreeing with her.

"This is the best Saturday we've had in a year," she said. "I want that noted."

"Noted," Samson said. "Filed. Under best Saturdays."

"You had a best Saturday list?"

"I have a mental list. It's short. There was the day we closed on this place, and the day the kitchen passed inspection, and today."

"Today's above the inspection?"

"The inspection didn't come with croissants."

Inez laughed and lifted her bottle toward him. "See, this is what I mean. You people used to be fun and then you got a house." She said it easy, no edge, the way you can only say it to neighbors you like. "You used to go places. I remember. When you first moved in, Carmen told me about the trip you took, the one where you missed the train."

"The Bologna train," Carmen said, and grinned at her husband. "Tell them about the Bologna train."

"There's nothing to tell. We missed a train."

"She doesn't let him tell it," Carmen said. "Because the real version is that he argued with a ticket machine for forty minutes and then we ate our body weight in gelato and took the later train and it's still one of my favorite days of my whole life."

"That was nine years ago," Samson said. "I was twenty-six. You were twenty-four. We had no furniture and no mortgage and a backpack each."

"And now?" Inez asked.

"Now we have a ceiling!"

"Half a ceiling," Bert said, from the slab.

"Half a ceiling," Samson agreed.

The beer went around. Carmen finished hers and looked out at the fence that needed restaining, and then said the thing she'd apparently been building toward, in the offhand way she said big things. "You know what I miss? Not being married. Obviously. Not Bert and Samson, you're both lovely. But I miss being the person who would just go. Who would hear about a thing happening tonight and just go to it."

"Spontaneity," Inez said, nodding slowly. "That's the word. I miss that. I own a bakery, I haven't