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Home Depot and load up your truck a hundred years ago. They had to cut the tree—and remember they didn’t have chain saws. Then they had to hew the logs: make the round sides flat. Even the chalk they used in their chalk boxes was made from local stuff, like pokeberry juice and lime.”
    “What’s a chalk box?”
    “What you use to snap out a line, so you know you’re cutting straight. You make the line, then score the log every two or three inches with a poleaxe. Then you use a broadaxe to slice off the chips.”
    “Which you could probably use as kindling, to start a fire.”
    “What?” My throat felt very tight.
    “Don’t look at me like that. I’m doing my best. I only know two things about wood: it grows on trees and you can burn it, and I only learned the second thing two days ago. But go on, I’m listening.”
    “This door—”
    “There isn’t a door.”
    “—doorframe. It’s pine that I split out myself, and it’s pegged with yellow locust.”
    “Locust? Strange name for—”
    I talked right over him. “Do you know how rare yellow locust is now? Do you know how long it takes to cut it, season it, then slice it into bars, then whittle it? Then you have to auger out the frame holes and get the wood braced properly against the logs. It’s hard to do that on your own, to get it vertical, to get a ninety-degree plane this way, too, and then to hold it there while you hammer in the pegs when you only have two hands and I don’t know how I’m going to hang the door itself, to make it all fit seamlessly so no one can tell I was— You have to never give up, never stop, because then you have to
see
—”
    “Aud…”
    “You have to see she’s not there, that there’s this great
hole
inside instead, nothing there—”
    “Aud…”
    My fists were balled and the veins on my wrists and the back of my hands thick blue worms.
    “Aud.”
    I panted. My face felt cold.
    “I’ll help you hang the door.”
    “The door?”
    “I’ll help you hang it.” He put down his beer. “Right now. Where is it?”
    “Inside.”
    “Then let’s get it.”
    My body belonged to someone else. I led him inside, over the wide, heart-of-pine floors that would be refinished once the door and windows were in, past the hearth I had already rebuilt, right through the wall that would be—between the studs I would cover with pine board one day soon—to the oak door. I had to put my own beer down before I could pick up the far end. He picked up the near. We walked it outside and leaned it on its end to the right of the doorway. He followed me to the hogpen, silently accepted hammer and nails and spirit level while I lifted down the massive wrought-iron hinge pieces and candy-cane-shaped drop pins, then followed me back.
    I watched myself lift half the hinge and put it against the logs at shoulder height and measure with the eyes, move it up slightly, hold it with the left hand, and with the right lay the spirit level along its top. Hinge a little low on the left. Move it slightly. Nod at Dornan, at the hammer in his hand, swap left hand for right and step to one side to watch while he puts in the big nail, don’t flinch even slightly as he swings, don’t move as what should be three swift blows for each of the three nails becomes a dozen swings, fourteen, then a pause, and on to the other hinge, at knee level this time. Bang bang bang, bang bang bang, bang bang bang. See Dornan’s pleasure: he can do this. Nod. Lift other hinge pieces, position, drop in steel spindle, move assembled hinge back and forth, remove. Measure door. Nail on upper hinge. Pause. Let Dornan nail on second. Pointing. Lifting the door. Holding, maneuvering, dropping in spindles. Done.
    And with a snap I smell my own sweat, feel utterly weary, realize Dornan is watching me carefully.
    “We hung a door,” he said.
    “I’m sorry,” I said, for the second time that day. He waited. “Going off like that. You must have— It’s…” I had