“I am staying here until you are settled,” Nate said. “But my cousin Otis is already asking when you are going to get your own place.”
“Two weeks,” I said. “I told him two weeks.”
I looked down at my worn tennis shoes under the library desk.
The thrift store on High Street had a faded yellow sign that said Second Chance Goods. The display window was full of chipped plates and old lamps that nobody wanted. Inside, the air was heavy with the smell of mothballs and wet wool.
Nate led the way past a rack of oversized winter coats to the back corner where the work gear was piled.
“You need something with a steel shank,” Nate said, his fingers tapping against his car keys in his pocket.
I sifted through the plastic bins of old shoes, moving aside worn sneakers and cracked loafers. Near the bottom of the third bin, my hand hit something heavy and hard.
They were dark brown leather, with scuffed toes that showed the dull silver metal underneath. The soles were thick rubber, worn down at the heels but mostly intact.
“Try them on,” Nate said, leaning against a stack of old tires.
I sat on a wooden stool and pulled off my torn canvas sneakers. The leather of the boots was stiff and cold, but my toes did not hit the front when I stood up.
“They are twelve dollars,” I said, reading the yellow tag tied to the laces.
I pulled the white paper envelope from my back pocket. It was the same envelope that had held my original forty-three dollars of savings when we left Dayton.
I counted out two five-dollar bills and two ones, leaving exactly thirty-one dollars in the paper.
“It leaves us enough for gas and some food,” Nate said, nodding toward the register.
The woman behind the counter did not look up from her crossword puzzle as she took the bills. She slid the boots into a black plastic bag without saying a word.
We drove to the demolition site on Broad Street in silence. The warehouse was a three-story brick building with boarded-up windows and a crumbling loading dock. The air inside was cold and thick with white dust that tasted of old plaster.
Jim, the demolition foreman, stood by the tool trailer with a clipboard in his hand. He was a broad-shouldered man with a gray mustache and a hard hat covered in union stickers.
He looked down at my feet before he looked at my face.
“Those are not new,” Jim said, pointing his pen at my scuffed leather boots.
“They have the steel toes,” I said, keeping my voice low and even.
“They look like they came off a dead man,” Jim said, loud enough for the other three workers to hear. “I do not need people tripping over their own soles on my stairs.”
I rubbed the small scar on my left palm, keeping my arms at my sides.
“The soles are tight,” I said. “I can do the work.”
Jim spit a dark stream of tobacco juice onto the gravel.
“We start on the third floor,” Jim said. “If you cannot keep up with the wheelbarrows, do not bother coming back tomorrow.”
The work was a steady line of lifting and carrying. We used heavy crowbars to pry loose the old pine floorboards, then loaded them into wheelbarrows to wheel down the steep wooden ramp.
By two o’clock, the arches of my feet were aching from the stiff leather. The heel of the right boot rubbed against my ankle with every step, but I did not slow down.
“Keep moving, Hayes,” Jim called out from the doorway. “We have two more truckloads to fill before five.”
My hands were raw under my work gloves, but I kept my shovel moving, clearing the piles of broken plaster and lath. When the whistle finally blew at five, my legs were heavy and my socks were damp with sweat.
I walked the four blocks to the bus stop, my feet burning with every step on the concrete.
The hallway of the Columbus trade school was bright and smelled of fresh paint and floor wax. The clock above the office door showed ten minutes past six.
I had run the last three blocks from the bus stop, my work clothes still covered in white plaster dust.
Instructor Davis was waiting outside the classroom door, holding a stack of blue course syllabi. He was a thin man with sharp blue eyes and wire-rimmed glasses.
“You are late, Leo,” Davis said, his voice flat.
“The demolition site ran over,” I said, wiping my forehead with my sleeve. “We had to clear the loading dock before the rain.”
“The evening program is for working men,” Davis said. “But we have forty people on the waiting list who can make it here by six.”
I looked down at the floor, my scuffed boots leaving gray dust on the clean linoleum.
“It will not happen again,” I said.
“If you miss another roll call, I will sign your withdrawal form myself,” Davis said, turning toward the classroom. “We do not waste space on people who are not serious.”
I walked in and sat in the back row, trying to keep my eyes open as he began writing framing calculations on the chalkboard.
My shoulders were stiff, and the dust from my shirt rose in the warm air of the room. The numbers on the board seemed to blur together, but I kept my hand on my pencil, forcing myself to write down every dimension for the joist spans.
The trade school tuition of fifteen hundred dollars hung over me, and my first payment of three hundred was due in two weeks. I needed every hour Jim would give me on the demolition site.
When the class finally ended at nine, I walked out to the street where Nate was waiting in his car. We drove to the diner on High Street to get something to eat.
The diner smelled of fried onions and burnt coffee, the yellow laminate tables sticky under the fluorescent lights. We sat in a corner booth near the kitchen.
The waitress set down two bowls of navy bean soup and a basket of crackers. The soup was ninety cents a bowl.
Nate took a spoonful of soup, then tapped his spoon against the side of his bowl, looking toward the window.
“I talked to my mother this afternoon,” Nate said.
“Is she doing all right?” I asked.
“She is fine,” Nate said, leaning forward. “But she saw your father at the hardware store yesterday morning.”
I held my spoon over my bowl, waiting for him to finish.
“He told everyone in town you could not hack it,” Nate said.
The word felt heavy in the quiet booth. I looked at the steam rising from my soup, my fingers cold against the metal spoon.
“He said you stole his tools and ran off to Columbus because you were scared of real work,” Nate said.
“I did not take his tools,” I said.
“I know that,” Nate said. “But he told the owner of Miller Construction that you are unreliable and lazy.”
“Miller was going to hire me for the summer,” I said.
“Not now,” Nate said. “Walter told him never to give you a day of work if you ever come back to Dayton.”
My father was shutting every door behind me, making sure there was nothing to return to.
“My mother said he looked angry,” Nate said, his voice dropping. “He told the neighbors you would be crawling back in a month with your pockets turned out.”
I did not answer him.
I looked down at my feet under the vinyl booth.
The scuffed thrift store boots were covered in gray plaster dust and dark mud from the warehouse floor. The leather was already cracking near the toe, showing the dull gray metal underneath.
I stared at my mud-covered boots, thinking of the twenty-eight dollars left in my envelope.
At five minutes to six the next morning, I was already standing in the damp dirt of the Broad Street job site. The streetlights along the curb cast long, yellow shadows across the plaster dust and shattered lath. The air was cool, carrying the sharp scent of old pine and wet lime mortar from the brickwork we had torn down the day before. I began pulling salvageable yellow pine studs out of the demolition heaps left by the evening crew. I stacked them by the curb, keeping the nails pointed down so nobody would step on them. My hands were cold inside my cheap work boots, but the physical labor kept my blood moving.
A woman in a gray wool coat and heavy leather boots stopped at the edge of the sidewalk, watching me work. She had a small brass pen tucked into a leather notebook under her arm. Her hair was pulled back tightly into a knot, and her dark eyes were sharp and steady.
“Jim said to scrap those,” she said.
Her voice was quiet but carried over the diesel idle of the dump truck parked across the street. I wiped my dusty palms on my canvas pants, feeling the small scar on my left hand rub against the fabric.
“They are first-growth pine,” I said. “You cannot buy wood like this at a modern lumber yard.”
She stepped closer, looking at the neat stack. Her name was Gail Vance, and Otis, my friend Nate’s cousin, had mentioned her name when we first arrived in Columbus. Otis had done some drywall patching for her last winter and said she owned several distressed rentals on the West Side.
“Who taught you to grade lumber?” she asked.
“My father,” I said. “He has a crew in Dayton.”
“But you are here in Columbus, stacking my scrap salvage for twelve dollars an hour.”
She did not wait for me to explain why I was ninety miles from home with only forty-three dollars in my pocket. She wrote something in her notebook with the brass pen, her movements quick and deliberate.
“I need someone who looks at a house and sees what it could be,” she said.
She tore a page from the back of the notebook and held it out to me. On it was an address on Oak Street and a time.
“Be there at seven tomorrow morning,” she said.
I took the paper, folding it twice before putting it in my shirt pocket. Jim, the demolition foreman, came around the corner of the house with a sledgehammer, looking at us with his brow furrowed.
“Are we clearing the back porch today, Gail?” Jim asked.
“Leo is,” she said.
She walked toward her sedan without looking back. I went back to the pine stack, my hands cold inside my cheap gloves.
The evening classes at the trade school met in the basement of an old vocational building on the South Side. The air always smelled of damp concrete, industrial floor wax, and the stale tobacco from the instructors’ coats. The pipes overhead rattled whenever someone walked on the floor above.
Instructor Davis sat at his metal desk, tapping a red pencil against a stack of graded papers. He was a retired commercial builder who did not care for excuses or late arrivals.
“You missed the first twenty minutes of the concrete estimation lecture last week, Hayes,” he said.
“I had a shift on the East Side,” I said.
He did not look up immediately, but he slid a white paper across the desk. A large red ninety-eight was written at the top of the page.
“You got the footings calculations correct,” Davis said. “Most of the guys who have been doing this for ten years still mess up the corner volume.”
“I spent three hours at the library on Tuesday,” I said.
“It shows. The second half of the tuition is due by Friday.”
“I have the cash,” I said.
The demolition wages of twelve dollars an hour had been enough to cover the rest of my tuition, but it left my pockets nearly empty. I counted out seven hundred and fifty dollars onto his desk, the bills thin and worn from being folded in my pocket.
“You are paid up, Hayes,” Davis said, stamping a blue ink seal onto my registration receipt. “But do not be late again. The next section is plumbing codes, and the state board does not offer re-takes.”
“I will be here,” I said.
I took the stamped receipt and put it in my wallet next to my driver’s license. The wallet felt lighter now, containing only a handful of singles.
I walked out of the classroom into the chilly evening air, holding my notebook under my arm. The streetlights along High Street were just turning on, casting long shadows across the pavement. I walked two blocks down to the corner diner where Nate was waiting in his sedan, the tailpipe rattling against the bumper.
“Did you pay the bill?” Nate asked as I got into the passenger seat.
“Every dime,” I said. “Now we have to find a place that doesn’t require a deposit.”
“Otis found something,” Nate said, putting the car in gear. “But it is not pretty.”
We drove toward the East Side, the old Ford engine whining as Nate pushed it up the grade. He tapped his fingers against the plastic steering wheel, his nervous habit showing whenever he had news he was not sure I wanted to hear.
“What is the catch?” I asked.
“It is above a dry cleaner’s on Third Avenue,” Nate said. “The smell of perc is pretty strong in the hallway, but the landlord doesn’t check references if you pay cash up front.”
We pulled into the gravel alley behind the brick building. The steam from the vents smelled like hot starch and old iron.
We climbed the rickety wooden stairs on the outside of the building, carrying my two cardboard boxes.
The room was nine feet wide with a single window that looked out onto the gravel parking lot below. The wallpaper was peeling in the corners, showing the gray plaster underneath.
“It has a radiator,” Nate said, kicking the iron pipes. “And a lock on the door.”
He handed me a small brass key he had gotten from the dry cleaner downstairs. I set my boxes on the mattress in the corner.
“How much did he want?” Nate asked.
“Eighty dollars for the first two weeks,” I said.
I slid four twenty-dollar bills onto the laminate dresser. That left me with exactly twelve dollars to my name until Gail Vance paid for the framing work.
Nate sat on the edge of the mattress, looking at the bare plaster walls. He chuckled, though his fingers kept tapping against his knees.
“At least your father doesn’t know where this alley is,” he said.
“He thinks I am still sleeping on Otis’s floor,” I said.
“He called Otis yesterday,” Nate said.
My hand stopped on the zipper of my duffel bag. I looked at him, waiting for the rest of his sentence.
“Otis didn’t tell him anything,” Nate said. “But your father told him you would be begging for a bus ticket home by November.”
I pulled my tool belt out of the box and hung it on the back of the closet door. The leather was scuffed, but the steel hammer loop was still solid.
“I have a meeting with Gail Vance at seven,” I said.
“The investor?” Nate asked. “She doesn’t hire rookies for real jobs.”
“She told me to bring my tools,” I said.
I lay down on the mattress after Nate left, listening to the hum of the dry cleaner’s presses downstairs. The ceiling fan hummed, turning slowly in the dark.
The office was on the second floor of an old bank building on Broad Street. The floors were dark oak, and a large map of Franklin County hung behind her desk with red pins stuck into the grid.
Gail Vance was writing in her leather notebook when I walked in. She did not look up immediately, but she pointed to a wooden chair across from her.
“The Oak Street house needs the back joists replaced,” she said. “The previous owner let the roof leak for six years.”
“I saw the sistered joists yesterday,” I said. “They used two-by-fours instead of two-by-eights.”
She stopped writing and looked at me, her brass pen balanced between her fingers.
“You noticed that?” she asked.
“The floor has a three-inch crown in the middle,” I said. “They didn’t level the sills before they nailed the subfloor.”
She closed the notebook with a soft snap. She slid a yellow folder across the desk toward me.
“I need someone to run a three-man crew to tear out the old sill and re-hang the floor,” she said.
My throat felt dry. I had never run a crew of my own, only followed my father’s orders on his sites.