Tribute

Hardy?”
    “It’s close to the circle of logical possibility,” Ford insisted.
    “Not in my world, Saw. I don’t remember him all that well, but I remember he was a hard-ass, and self-righteous.”
    “In my world, the self-righteous are often the ones sneaking around getting blow jobs before they go home to the wives and kiddies.”
    Brian sobered, considered. “Yeah, you got a point. And God knows my grandmother must’ve been hard to live with. Water was never quite wet enough for her. God, she ragged on my mom all the damn time. Right up till she died. It’d be kind of cool,” he decided, “if Big Drew Morrow had a few rounds with Janet Hardy.”
    It wasn’t lying not to mention the claims of pregnancy, and the ugly tenor of the last letters. It was just . . . not mentioning. “Do you have anything he wrote? Birthday card, letter, anything?”
    “No. My mother would, I guess. She keeps family papers and that kind of stuff.”
    “Can you get a sample of his handwriting without letting her know what it’s for?”
    “Probably. She’s got a box of my stuff out in the garage. School papers, cards, that kind of shit. There might be something in there. She’s been after me to take it to my place for years. I could get it out of her way, take a look through.”
    “Cool. Thanks.”
    “Hey!” Shanna shouted over. “Are you guys about finished or do I have to plant this whole terrace myself ?”
    “Nag, nag,” Brian shouted back.
    Ford studied her. Built, bawdy, beautiful. “How come you never went there?”
    “Window of opportunity passed, and she became my sister.” He shrugged. “But we’ve got a deal. If we’re both single when we hit forty, we’re going to Jamaica for a week and spend the whole time engaged in mad, jungle sex.”
    “Well. Good luck with that.”
    “Only nine years to go,” Brian called out as he strode back toward Shanna.
    For a moment, Ford was simply struck dumb. Nine years? Was that it? He didn’t think about being forty. Forty was another decade. The grown-up decade.
    How did it get to be only nine years off?
    Jamming his hands in his pockets, he veered toward the house to find Cilla.
    In the kitchen, where even the slices and chunks of counter had been torn out and hauled away, and odd-looking pipes poked out of a floor that might have been snacked on by drunken rodents, Buddy worked at a wide slice in the plaster wall.
    He turned with some sort of large tool in his hand that made Ford think of a metal parrot head mated with a giraffe’s neck.
    “Who the hell puts a goddamn faucet over the goddamn stove?” Buddy demanded.
    “I don’t know. Ah, in case of fire?”
    “That’s a load of crap.”
    “It’s the best I’ve got. Is Cilla around?”
    “Woman’s always around. Check up in the attic. Toilets in the attic,” Buddy muttered as he went back to work. “Faucets over the stove. Want a tub in the bedroom next.”
    “Actually, I’ve seen . . . Nothing,” Ford said when Buddy turned slitted eyes on him. “I see nothing.”
    He trooped his way through the house, noted that the trim was nearly finished in the hall, the entryway. On the second floor, he poked into rooms. He could still smell the paint in a room with walls of a subtle, smoky brown. In the master, he studied the three colors brushed on the wall. Apparently, she hadn’t yet decided between a silvery gray, a gray-blue and a muted gold.
    He wandered down the hall, then up the widened, finished stairs. She stood with Matt, each holding a sample of wood up to the light streaming through the window.
    “Yeah, I like the contrast of the oak against the walnut.” Matt nodded. “You know what we could do? We could trim it out in the walnut. You’ve got your . . . Hey, Ford.”
    “Hey.”
    “Summit meeting,” Cilla told him. “Built-ins.”
    “Go right ahead.”
    “Okay, like this.” With his pencil, Matt began to draw on the drywall, and Ford’s attention shifted to the swaths of paint brushed on the opposite wall. She had the same silvery gray here, and a warm cheery yellow competing with what he’d call apricot.
    He took a look in the bathroom, at the tiles and tones.
    He tuned back in to hear Matt and Cilla come to an agreement on material and design.
    “I’ll get started on this in my shop,” Matt told her.
    “How’s Josie feeling?”
    “Hot and impatient, and wondering why the hell she didn’t do the math last winter and realize she’d be going through the summer