The Foreman

He was typing on his phone when I walked up. He pressed the screen, and stopped, and pressed again.

"Take your time," I said.

My name's Carlo. I'm 62 years old. Three months ago I walked out of a fifteen-year relationship with a man named Jacob, and tonight I was standing on a sidewalk at eleven at night, waiting to meet a stranger off an app.

The stranger's name was Burt. He was 58. Foreman on a commercial renovation. We'd been chatting online for a month. A whole month. He didn't send dick pics and he didn't ask what I was wearing. He asked what plays I'd been in. I'm an actor, by the way. Mostly commercial work lately, some regional stuff, one off-off-Broadway thing that got a nice review and no money.

Jacob and I met when I was 47 and he was 44. Fifteen years. And then one day in March I looked at him across the kitchen and realized we were roommates who shared a history. I moved out in March. He kept the good couch.

So here I was.

"Sorry," Burt said, looking up. "My sister. She thinks eleven p.m. is a fine time to discuss her roof."

"Is she getting a new one?"

"She's getting three quotes and calling me after every single one. You want a drink? There's a bar two blocks from my site."

"Site?"

"Yeah, I figured. Rather than a bar, come see the job. I'm doing a late walkthrough anyway. You ok with that?"

Most guys propose a hotel. This guy proposed drywall.

"Lead the way," I said.

* * *

The place was a bakery once. Now it was a gutted shell on a quiet block, metal roll-up door half down. Burt ducked under it and propped it open with a cinder block.

"Watch the threshold," he said. "And the dust. Dust is the whole job right now."

I stepped inside. Temporary lights hung from exposed beams. Concrete floors gray with powder. The air smelled of drywall and sawdust and, faintly, coffee from the all-night diner down the block.

"It's going to be a theater," Burt said. "Small one. Sixty seats, maybe seventy."

"Really?"

"Really. Owner's some actress with money. Crew calls it the bakery. I call it my retirement plan, because if this job kills me I don't need one."

I laughed. Honest laugh, first one in weeks.

He walked me through the bones of the place. Here would be the stage. There, the rigging points, still bare steel in the ceiling. A stack of lumber sat in the middle like an island.

"Stand on the stage," he said. "Tell me if the sight lines work."

I stood where the stage would be. Bare concrete, dust everywhere. Lights strung overhead. And I don't know. Something about the rawness of it. No walls, no ceiling tiles, nothing finished. Just potential, hanging in the air.

"I like this," I said. "The unfinished part."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah. It's honest. You can see exactly what it is. Nothing's pretending yet."

Burt leaned on a stud wall and looked at me. "That's the nicest thing anyone's said about my jobsite."

"It's the nicest thing I've said in months, so we're even."

We cracked open two beers he had in a cooler by the door and sat on the lumber stack like a couple of kids on a dock. We talked until one in the morning. I told him about the split. He didn't say sorry or make a face. He just nodded and said, "Fifteen years is a real chunk of life." That was it. That was exactly the right amount.

* * *

Second night. Thursday. I brought takeout from the diner, two sandwiches and fries in a greasy bag, and Burt had two sawhorses set up with a plank across them like he'd been waiting for me.

"You built me a table," I said.

"Don't get sentimental. It's scrap."

We sat on the sawhorses and ate. His crew had gone home hours ago. Just us and the string lights and a radio playing some classic rock station from two counties over.

"Talk about your crew," I said. "You've mentioned Danny four times. I feel like I know him."

"Danny's twenty-six, thinks he invented drywall. Good kid. Slow, but good. Then there's Gail, she runs my electrical, and Ray, who's older than me and refuses to admit his knees are gone. Ray has been threatening to retire since 2019."

"Maybe he just likes the complaining."

"Ray definitely likes the complaining."

I told him about auditions. The cattle-call stuff. Thirty actors in a hallway, all pretending they're not sizing each other up. He asked real questions. What do they actually look for. How do you remember lines. I explained I mostly don't, I learn the shape of the speech and trust my mouth.

"Honest and a little terrifying," he said. "Like pouring a footing."

"Is that good?"

"That's the best thing in this trade. You trust the pour and you don't touch it."

And then I said the thing I'd been carrying around. "You know what's good, since March? Nobody to check in with. Nobody waiting up. I get home at midnight, I eat cereal over the sink, and it's nobody's business."

Burt chewed his fries and nodded.

"Don't get me wrong, I loved him," I said. "But that leash. Even a soft one."

"Never been married," he said. "Last long thing ended when I was 51. Seven years. What I remember most is the relief when it was done, and then feeling bad about the relief."

"Exactly! Thank you. It's not a crime to be glad."

"It's not," he said. "It's just data."

God, I liked him.

* * *

Third evening. Saturday. He texted me a photo of the stage platform half-built and wrote, come judge it. I brought the thermos. Coffee, black, from the diner. It was past ten when I got there.

The stage was real now. Plywood deck, two feet up, sanded edges. I walked out on it and stomped once, twice.

"Solid," I said.

"Should be. I overbuilt it like everything else."

He climbed up and sat on the edge next to me, legs hanging off, two idiots about to give a speech to nobody. Then he opened the thermos I'd handed him, filled the cap, and passed it back. And as he passed it, his hand brushed my knee.

Just that. Knuckles against my knee through my jeans.

He didn't pull away fast. He didn't linger either. It just sat there, this small warm point of contact, one second, maybe two, while neither of us looked at it.

"Good coffee," he said, and took his hand back.

"Yeah," I said. My voice came out lower than I meant.

We drank sitting on the edge of the stage. The radio played. Somewhere outside a bus hissed past. I was 62 years old and my knee was on fire from a two-second touch, and I loved every second of it.

"Carlo," he said.

"Yeah."

"I'm going to say a thing and you can stop me."

"Okay."

"I like you. I like talking to you. And I'd like to kiss you, and I'd also be completely fine if you said no and we kept eating sandwiches on scrap lumber."

"Who's stopping," I said.

He set the thermos cap down on the plywood, careful, like it was a prop that mattered. Then he leaned in and kissed me. Dry at first, careful, his hand flat on my chest not pulling, just resting there. I kissed him back and felt sixty-two years old and about nineteen at the