A Little Love Story by Roland Merullo

Author:Roland Merullo
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Cystic fibrosis - Patients, Traffic accidents, Governors - Staff, Governors, Cystic fibrosis, Artists, Contemporary, Fiction, Romance, Construction workers, Popular American Fiction, Massachusetts, Fiction - General, General, Love stories
ISBN: 9781400032556
Publisher: Random House, Inc.
Published: 2006-08-08T07:00:00+00:00

Book Three

N o v e m b e r

1

BY EARLY NOVEMBER in Boston the trees have lost most of their leaves. On wet days the branches and trunks are black and slick-looking. In the afternoons a damp hard wind blows off the harbor, and then darkness swells up out of the tar streets, and the traffic lights shine like jewels. It is not winter but no longer truly fall, and the tourists are gone, and the city is stripped down to a tight rhythm of moneymaking: the mouths of subways suck in clots of workers and breathe them out again across town; the streets are full of taxis and delivery trucks and touched with a kind of coldness and sadness I have always secretly liked.

I like it right through Thanksgiving, and the first snow, and Christmas, and then, near the middle of January, I begin to hate it. The days will never be warm again, I’ll never wear a T-shirt and running shorts again, or see women walking down Massachusetts Avenue with their legs bare and happiness on their faces. There is ice on the river, or the water is purple and raw. Why would anyone want to live here?

But November is fine. Smart carpenters have gotten their outside work finished by then—Gerard and I learned that the hard way one year—so, by Election Day, we had Jacqueline’s addition closed in and clapboarded.

Once we had the outside work done, we cut open the tight pink rolls of fiberglass insulation and stapled them into the stud bays, a miserable job that makes your wrists and neck itch for hours afterwards. On top of the insulation we stapled sheets of clear plastic, to keep the water vapor that’s inside the house from penetrating the walls and making the insulation damp and ineffective. And when that was done we began to put up the wall-board—Sheetrock, it’s usually called.

Hanging “rock” is not a particularly enjoyable job. The board itself is made of pressed gypsum, heavy and awkward, and the cuts and joints have to be done just right. Most carpenters used screws and drills by then, but I have a crazy need to do some things the out-of-date way, so Gerard and I used hammer and nail. The trick to nailing up Sheetrock is to press the board tight against the studs with one hand and hit each nail hard enough so that you make a “dimple,” but not so hard that you cut through the gray paper that holds the pressed gypsum in place. Later, you fill the dimple with joint compound and sand it smooth, and if you do it right, when the wall is painted, the nail and the dimple don’t show. The best old carpenters have a feel for it, and, high or low, swing so that the business end of the hammer strikes the wallboard flat-on.

Gerard was a past master at dimpling. That Election Day morning—it was sunny and nice, low fifties—I heard him in what would be Jacqueline’s guest bedroom giving her a lecture on Sheetrock.

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