Bottle Jack

The Habit

Chapter 15: Bottle Jack

He asked Darren on Wednesday.

The asking took less courage than the decision to ask had required, which turned out to be true of more things than Noel liked admitting. He stood at Darren's desk after lunch while Darren was arguing with a contractor about a setback and said, when the call ended, "You busy Saturday morning?"

Darren narrowed his eyes.

"You asking because you need a man, or because you want to hear me say I am booked solid and then feel morally cleared?"

"Need a hand with the porch."

Darren's expression shifted into something almost ceremonial.

"All right," he said. "Now hold on while I enjoy this."

"Don't."

"Too late. What time?"

Saturday came cool and bright. Darren arrived at 8:02 in an F-150 with a bottle jack in the bed, two lengths of pressure-treated pine, a socket set, and a small soft cooler.

"Lisa made sandwiches," he said by way of greeting. "She said if I helped a man jack up his porch without feeding him, she'd count it as a theological failure."

They crawled under the porch at 8:19.

The split joist looked worse in company. Not structurally. Morally. Damage that a person has stared at alone for months acquires a false privacy. The minute another set of eyes sees it, the damage becomes what it always was: simply visible.

"Yep," Darren said. "She's done."

"Still holding."

"That's what 'done' means in a house. The thing hasn't fallen yet."

They set the bottle jack under the compromised span on a square of scrap plywood to spread the load. Darren cranked. The porch rose by increments so small Noel could feel them more than see them, the structure complaining in old-wood language: a series of clicks and relieved groans that sounded less like pain than argument.

They sistered the new joist beside the split one, bolted the members together, added a second support because Noel had already bought the wood and Darren was the kind of man who considered overbuilding a moral virtue when the difference in cost was under forty dollars.

Work gave them the only intimacy either of them actually trusted. Hold that. Pass me the lag. Little more. No, the other end. Conversation came through the labor in fragments.

"So Memphis was real?" Darren said at one point, his voice muffled by the beam above them.

"Yeah."

"How'd that go?"

Noel tightened a nut. "Quiet."

"Quiet good or quiet bad?"

"Quiet accurate."

Darren considered this.

"I know some marriages like that."

Around noon they took a break and sat on the porch steps with Lisa's sandwiches. Pimento cheese on white bread, wrapped in foil, still cool. The yard looked slightly different from a leveled porch. Not prettier. Less tilted in the eye.

"You should've asked me six months ago," Darren said.

"I know."

"You say that a lot."

"Usually because I know."

Darren took a bite of sandwich. Chewed. Swallowed.

"For what it's worth," he said, looking out at the street instead of at Noel, "help doesn't get more dignified by waiting until the wood's rotten."

The sentence was irritating in the way useful sentences often are. Noel let it sit.

They finished by three. The porch floor was true enough that the metal chair no longer had to be nudged into its least-wobbly orientation. The third step still groaned, but in a different register. A complaint instead of a warning.

When Darren loaded the tools back into the truck, Noel said, "Thanks."

Darren shut the tailgate.

"Yep."

That was all. Which was one reason Noel trusted him.

At the table that night he wrote:

Asked Darren for help and he showed up with a bottle jack, two lengths of pine, and sandwiches Lisa wrapped in foil. The porch sits truer tonight. I had forgotten that some things go faster when another set of hands is willing to hold the weight.

He read the entry once and went out to sit on the repaired porch.

The chair settled level beneath him.

For a long moment he did nothing with his hands at all.