“They really think they’re the end-all, don’t they?” Allie said.

Leo didn’t say anything. He took a breath and let it out.

“What?”

“What the hell’s wrong with you?”

“Me?”

“You’re practically naked, for Christ’s sake. They were staring right at your tits.”

She stood up fast. “Oh don’t be a jerk, Leo. They’re my tits.”

Leo looked down at the raft boards. He didn’t know what to say; she was right, but then again somehow she wasn’t.

She stepped over and took his hand. “I’m famished. Let’s go eat.”

They jumped into the water. Allie hit first, then Leo. He sank deeper than her, and when his arm jerked at hers underwater, he didn’t let go.

14

The air was so still and heavy Monday morning Leo smelled the pulp pools all the way up to the job site. The sky was the color of tin, and from where he stood on the second floor, he could see two squirrels on the roof of the barn, a fat one chasing a skinny one right along the ridge to the back where Leo couldn’t see them anymore. He saw a willow branch dip as one or both of them took hold. It wasn’t even coffee break yet and his T-shirt was sticking to him all over.

“All set?” Chick stood below. He held up an eight-foot-long, four-foot-wide plywood sheet for Leo to take. Leo grabbed it by the corners, pulled, then stepped back onto the next joist and the one behind it. He turned the plywood on its edge, then Tom took it and with a heave and a swing dropped it onto the stack against the north wall. Chick already had another sheet held up as Leo stepped back to the header. When Leo bent over, gripped the plywood and pulled, he was looking into Chick’s face a second but Chick wasn’t looking into his; his eyes were on the sky as he grunted air out his mouth and pressed the wood over his head. He had whiskers like he hadn’t shaved since Thursday when he punched out Floyd, but he’d been working as steady and business-like as always, even though Tom talked to him first thing this morning just outside the barn. Leo was gassing up the generator and he heard Chick say, “That’s that, I guess,” just before the two men went to work.

Tom was pushing pretty hard. With each new plywood sheet, he seemed to step in and take it a little faster, heave it higher, and toss it with a vengeance onto the stack. Leo thought it was because Chick shrugged off Tom’s news like he would a stubbed toe. This morning, when Jim had dropped Leo off at the Donovans’, Chick was already in the truck, sipping a coffee. He waved at Jim and he was so damn cheerful as he drove Leo down the river road to the job. Leo wanted to know about the weekend, about how it went over in Boston with those pamphlets, but Chick didn’t leave any room for him to speak. He didn’t mention his trip, or last Thursday; he was talking about picnics in Washington State when before Christopher was born and Allie Cat was a little girl, he and Tess would drive her out to a park outside Tacoma where there was nothing but hills of long grass, “Green grass, Leo. There’s so much rain up there in the Northwest, their grass is emerald. Emerald. And you should’ve seen Allie running and jumping through that stuff.