The Estimate

Hal Brennan had built or fixed half the houses in the valley, and he knew the old Warbler place the way you know a tooth that aches. It had been empty eleven years. He had walked past it most weeks of those eleven years, and every time he had thought the same thing, which was: somebody should see to that roof before the winter does. Nobody ever saw to the roof. The Warbler place sat at the end of Warbler Road with its windows gone grey and its garden gone wild, and the valley let it. Then in the spring a woman bought it. Hal heard about it the way you hear about everything in a small valley, which is at the hardware store, from a man who had it from a man. The buyer was a widow. From away — not far away, the next county, but the next county counted as away if you were strict about it, and the valley was strict about it. She had paid cash for a house no sensible person would pay anything for, and she had moved in alone, and now, the man at the hardware store said, she was looking for a carpenter. "You should go up there, Hal," the man said. "Before some cowboy from the town does, and charges her double, and does it wrong." So Hal went up there. He drove out to Warbler Road on a Tuesday with his clipboard and his tape and his good boots, and he stood in the wild garden and looked at the house properly for the first time in eleven years, close up, and it was worse than he'd thought and also, somehow, better. Worse because the roof was every bit as far gone as he'd feared, and there was rot in the porch, and the chimney had a lean to it that he didn't love. Better because under all of that the bones were good. Whoever had built the Warbler place a hundred and twenty years ago had built it to mean it. You could feel that, standing in front of it. Some houses are built like a promise. The woman came out onto the bad porch before he'd knocked. She was about his own age, Hal thought, which surprised him, though he could not have said what he'd been expecting. Sixty, near enough. Grey hair cut sensible. She had the look of a person who had recently done a great deal of crying and had then, very deliberately, stopped, and Hal knew that look, because he had worn it himself for a couple of years and he could spot it on others now the way you spot a man favoring a bad knee. "You'll be the carpenter," she said. "Brennan. They said you were the one who wouldn't lie to me about it." "That's the reputation," Hal said. "It's mostly that I'm too slow to think up a good lie. Mrs. —" "Eleanor. Just Eleanor. I'm done being a Mrs., it turned out to have an expiry date." She said it without bitterness, just stating it, the way you'd state the weather. "Come and look at my terrible house, Mr. Brennan, and tell me the truth about it, all of it, even the parts that'll cost me." So Hal went up onto the bad porch, testing each board out of long habit, and he walked Eleanor's terrible house with his clipboard, and he told her the truth about it. It took an hour. The roof, the porch, the leaning chimney, the window frames, the wiring he didn't trust, the kitchen that belonged in a different decade. He did not soften any of it, because she had asked him not to, and because forty years of the trade had taught him that a person who is lied to about a house ends up hating the house, and the Warbler place did not deserve to be hated, it had been waited on long enough. "Six weeks," he said, at the kitchen table, at the end of it, writing the estimate out longhand because he had never gotten the hang of doing it any other way. "If the weather holds. To make it sound and warm and safe. The pretty can come after — the pretty's never the urgent part. Six weeks to make it a house you can get through a winter in." Eleanor looked at the figure. She didn't flinch at it, which told him she'd been braced for worse. "Six weeks," she said. And then she looked up, and she looked around the kitchen — the bad kitchen, the cold kitchen, the kitchen of a house she had bought alone with money from a life that had expired — and Hal watched something cross her face that was not about money at all. "I bought a wreck on purpose, Mr. Brennan," she said quietly. "I want you to know that. My children think I've lost my mind. A widow, alone, in a falling-down house at the end of a road. But I had thirty-six years in a house where everything already worked, where nothing needed me, and then he died, and the house just — carried on. Working. Not needing me." She smoothed the estimate flat on the table. "I didn't want a house that was finished. I wanted one that had something left to do. Does that sound mad to you?" Hal Brennan, who fixed other people's homes for a living and drove home every night to an empty one he had stopped doing anything to, turned his pencil over in his fingers. "No," he said. "No, Eleanor. That sounds like the most sensible thing anyone's said to me in a long while." He signed the bottom of the estimate and slid it across the cold table. "Six weeks. We'll start Monday. And we'll do it slow and we'll do it right, because that's the only way I know how, and it sounds like it might be what you're after anyway."