The Kitchen Renovation

I turn forty-five in nine days and I was standing in a gutted kitchen in the Scottish Highlands counting salvaged tiles like they were a metaphor. Which they weren't. They were just tiles. But it was late autumn, the wind was throwing rain at the plastic sheeting we'd stapled over the window holes, and I was forty-four years old, about to be forty-five, and I genuinely cared about grout lines. That was the part nobody warned you about. Not the wrinkles or the knees, but the day you wake up and realize a level sink counter matters to you more than most people do.

Uncle Rab had left me the contract when he died. Well, not the contract exactly. He left me the job, the tools, and a note that said "finish it, it's nearly done." It was not nearly done. It was a stripped room with studs showing, a camp stove for the crew's tea, and a floor that was mostly plywood and old glue. Two years of work, maybe less if the weather held and the suppliers didn't let me down again.

"Franny? You in here?"

That was Daniel. I knew it was Daniel because he had that way of announcing himself like he was apologizing for existing. Twenty-nine years old, from London, doing UX research on a laptop when he wasn't hauling plasterboard, and apparently saving up for some trip he kept vague about. He was younger than me by fifteen years and he had that lanky, unfinished look some men have at that age, all elbows and bad posture and a jaw that hadn't decided what it wanted to be yet.

"In here," I called. "Mind the buckets."

He came around the plastic sheet and nearly stepped in the mortar tub anyway. He was holding a torch under his chin like someone telling ghost stories.

"You're here early," I said. "Shift doesn't start for two hours."

"I know. I know. I've lost my passport."

I put down the trowel and looked at him. "Your passport."

"My passport. I need it. There's a thing I have to do and I need it and I can't find it anywhere in my room."

"And you think it's in here."

"The last place I remember having it, I was checking a measurement for you and I took it out of my jacket to look at the picture, which sounds mad, I know, but I do that sometimes, and then Mack called me about the delivery and I stuffed it somewhere."

"Stuffed it somewhere. In a construction site. Where everything is either dust, sharp, or already in a skip."

"Thank you, yes, that's the situation, yes."

I laughed. I couldn't help it. He stood there looking wounded, and a grown man in a hi-vis vest losing a passport in a pile of rubble gets funnier the more you think about it.

"Alright," I said. "Where did you check the measurement?"

"The window opening. The big one on the north wall."

"Then we look around the north wall. And if it's not there, we look everywhere else, because this place has swallowed three tape measures, one hammer, and Mack's phone charger, and it's not giving any of them back."

We started at the window opening. There was a trough of debris along the sill where we'd been knocking plaster off the bricks, and I got down on my knees with a hand rake and started turning it over gently. Daniel crouched opposite me with the torch.

"Sorry about this," he said.

"Sorry for what? This is my favorite part of the job. Treasure hunting."

"It's not treasure. It's a passport."

"Everything's treasure if it's lost. You should see the state of me if I misplace my keys. Full crime scene investigation."

He laughed at that, a real laugh, and I noticed again that he laughed with his whole face, which is a thing most people grow out of by thirty and he hadn't yet. Then I noticed I was noticing, and I told myself to get on with the rake.

There was a stack of salvaged tiles by the door, the old ones we'd pulled out, Victorian, dark green with a white border, and Rab had wanted them saved. Somewhere under that stack I figured half the site's lost property was living. I pulled the top box over and started lifting tiles out one by one.

"Oh, careful with those," Daniel said. "They're actually lovely."

"They're better than lovely. They're the whole reason this kitchen is going to look like something when it's done. Uncle Rab saved them from a hotel demolition in Inverness. Carried them back in the boot of his car, a hundred and forty miles, wrapped in tea towels."

"That's a good uncle."

"He was a menace. But yes. Good."

I had the box about half empty when I saw it. Something flat and metal, glinting under the torch. I dug it out with two fingers and held it up. A watch. Old one, gold-toned, heavy, the kind with a leather strap gone soft with age. It had stopped, of course. Everything in that box had stopped.

"What's that?"

"Someone's watch. Not yours?"

He took it and turned it over. "No," he said. "Not mine." He held it a moment longer, thumb moving across the glass, and handed it back. "It's a nice one, though. Someone will miss it."

"Someone has been missing it for years by the look of it. I'll put it in the office drawer with the rest of the site's dead. If nobody claims it by the end of the job, I'll wear it."

"You'd wear a strange dead man's watch?"

"I'd wear a strange lost watch. There's a difference and it's important." I put it in my apron pocket. "So where else do you stuff things? Pockets? Bags? Did you check your own car?"

"I checked the car."

"Roof of the car?"

He groaned. "Don't. I once drove from Birmingham to Manchester with my phone on the roof."

"Then it's either on the M74 somewhere or it's in this kitchen, and this kitchen isn't letting go of anything it's got, so we keep looking."

We worked our way along the wall in silence for a bit. Rake, torch, shift, rake. Outside the plastic the rain kept up its noise. It was the kind of morning where the light comes in grey and slow and never really arrives, and I found I didn't mind it. That was another thing about this job. I'd expected to hate the isolation. Instead I'd gotten used to the quiet, to the wind, to the fact that the nearest person who wasn't crew was eleven miles down a single-track road.

"Can I ask you something," Daniel said, after a while. "You live here on site most weeks, yeah? Alone?"

"Most weeks. It's not tragic, Daniel. I've done it a long time."

"Why? If you don't mind me asking. You're, I don't know. You don't seem like someone who'd want to be alone all the time."

I sat back on my heels and looked at him. He went a bit pink around the ears. "I chose it," I said. "Ages ago, in my twenties, I traveled and worked every odd job going, and at some point I noticed I liked my own company better than most other people's. So I kept it. Simple as that."

"Doesn't it get lonely?"

"Sometimes. But it's the kind of lonely I picked, which is different."

He nodded at that like I'd said something wise, which I hadn't, and then he went quiet again, longer than before. I kept raking. I could feel him working up to something, the way you can with anyone who talks a lot when they're fine and goes silent when they're not.

"Franny."

"Still here."

"There's something in my car I should probably tell you about, since we're stuck in a kitchen together and you'll hear it eventually."

"Is it the passport?"

"No. The passport is still lost. It's my dad. His ashes. They're in a tin in the boot. A biscuit tin, which he'd have hated, he was a quality-control man, he'd have wanted something more dignified, but I ran out of time in London and the funeral place put them in whatever they had." He was looking at the floor while he said it. "I'm driving up to the north coast when the job finishes. That's the trip. That's why I needed the passport, actually, there's a ferry, and he was from there, and I'm meant to spread them somewhere he'd like, and I keep not doing it. It's been four months and I keep driving past the turnoff."

I put the rake down. "Come here," I said, and pointed at the tile box. "Sit. Take a break. And tell me about your dad while we finish emptying this."

He sat down on the edge of the box, careful of the tiles, and started talking.

He talked about his dad the way people do when they haven't said any of it out loud before. The quality-control job, the garden shed, the way he'd treated a ferry timetable like scripture. I emptied tiles while he talked, stacking them by the door with the white borders facing up, and mostly I just let him go.

"He'd have hated this kitchen," Daniel said, gesturing at the studs with his tea mug. "Bare wood showing. He'd have called it unfinished. Not messy, unfinished. There was a difference, apparently."

"Your dad would've hated my whole life then. I've got a camp stove and a plastic window."

"No, he'd have liked you. He liked people who finished things. He'd have checked your timeline and told you where you'd slip."

"He'd have been right too. Suppliers are going to fail, they always fail."

We got the box emptied by noon and I decided that was enough passport hunting for one day. The rain hadn't quit and the north wall was a swamp, and I was in one of those moods where if I looked at that window opening one more minute I was going to say something unkind about a window.

"Lunch," I said. "Then I've got a better idea for you."

"Better than raking mud?"

"Much better. You're going to help me stack lumber, because the delivery comes Thursday and if it lands on top of this mess we're both ruined. And after that, dinner. Proper one. I've got a camp stove and I've got opinions about it."

He looked so pleased about the dinner part that I had to turn away and check the tiles for no reason.

The lumber stacking went fine until it didn't. That's the thing I keep coming back to, hours later, writing this. It went fine, we fell into a rhythm, and then his hand brushed my hip reaching past me for the same board, and we both stopped dead. Not jumped. Just stopped, like two people hearing a noise at the same time.

"Sorry," he said.

"You're fine."

He didn't move his hand straight off. Then he did, and picked up his end of the board, and we carried it over and set it down, and we did not speak for the length of the whole walk back.

"You know what your problem is," I said, because silence was going to make it worse. "You're too young to be clumsy. When you're my age you'll have earned the right to grab a hip. Until then it's just poor spatial awareness."

"That's, wow. Okay." He was laughing, sort of, in a strangled way. "In my defense, you were reaching for the same board."

"I was not. I was standing near a board. There's a difference and it's important."

"You've said that twice now."

"It's a good line. I'm keeping it."

He grinned at that and the weird frozen thing between us cracked a little, but not all the way. We stacked the rest with careful distances, like two people on a crowded train, and I caught myself wondering if he was doing the same math I was doing. The fifteen years. The whole live-alone-on-purpose thing. The fact that I was his boss, sort of, in the loosest way a waitress who inherited a contract can be anyone's boss.

Anyway. Dinner.

Here's what I made on the camp stove, and I want it noted that I did this with two burners and a spatula with a melted handle: sausages, onions done slowly until they went sweet, tinned potatoes fried in the fat, and a jar of mustard I'd been saving for no reason I could name. The kitchen has no walls, mind. We ate sitting on the tile box with our plates on our knees, under a work light, with rain hammering the plastic sheeting like it had a grudge.

"This is the best meal I've had in Scotland," Daniel said.

"That's a low bar. You've been eating crew sandwiches."

"The bar is low and you cleared it by miles. What is this mustard?"

"Uncle Rab's. Whole pantry of stuff he never opened. Man bought condiments like other men bought lottery tickets."

I'd found the whiskey that afternoon, actually, third shelf of the pantry, behind a case of tinned tomatoes. Two bottles, dusty, and I'd stood there holding one and thought, well. It's not