“And then you come along,” David said. “With your tools and your quiet ways.”

“You just offer to fix things like it’s nothing.”

“It makes me feel like I’m failing her,” David said.

The confession hung in the cold air of the workshop.

A drop of rain tapped against the small windowpane near the roof.

“Oh, David,” I said, reaching out my hand.

He didn’t pull away this time, but he didn’t take my hand either.

“I thought if I sold it all,” David said, “the pressure would go away.”

“I thought if the tools were gone, nobody could ask me to use them.”

“Nobody could compare me to him anymore.”

Harold walked over to the old Delta band saw.

He ran a hand over the cast-iron table, leaving a clean grease-free streak in the light dust.

“My father was a mason,” Harold said quietly.

David looked up, his eyes defensive but curious.

“He could lay a stone wall so straight you could lay a level on it for fifty feet and never see a gap,” Harold said.

“When he died, he left me his trowels and his hammers.”