Yet what seemed like a genius solution in the parking lot of a Home Depot on a ketamine hangover was significantly more distressing once I stood in the lumber aisle. I needed—shit—four panels per was a total of twenty-four sheets of five-eighth-inch plywood, at roughly eighty-three pounds per sheet was…nearly two thousand pounds.

Oh God. I sat down in the middle of the aisle and kept adding.

Plus two-ply lattices—one per panel; twenty-four sheets, twenty-three pounds per, another, what, five hundred, six hundred pounds? Each panel, backed with fiberglass, required twenty-four linear feet of wood to frame plus four feet to angle the corners, twenty-eight feet, times thirty-six, was…oh God…a thousand? Ish? Yes. One thousand and eight. Plus trash cans for mixing, foam to carve the molds, canvas drop cloths, four or five dehumidifiers, the big kind, however many they had, at least a dozen gallons of Elmer’s, and four or five pounds of drywall compound.

I ordered from an associate at the counter, who promised they could deliver everything the following day. She rang me up, and then I remembered the sawhorses; I’d need…oh, two per panel, so…forty-eight of those, too.

“What kind of truck do you have?” she asked.

“Nissan,” I said. “Six-foot bed.”

“It’ll be delicate but we can rope those in tonight if you want,” she told me. “Tip the guys if that’s okay,” and I almost hugged her. The bill wasn’t bad: five grand.

Five was only the beginning. I needed pigments, and dozens of gallons of medium, Liquin, Galkyd, and turp too—not to mention resin, silicone, bleach, rubber, beeswax—and so I sat with my notebook, adding it all up while they loaded the truck. When they finished and the tips were dispersed, I called Pearl once—no answer. I checked the time and called again: nothing.

On the third try, Jonah picked up.

He didn’t sound happy. “You know we’re closing right now,” he said, annoyed, instead of the usual “Pearl.”

“I have a big order,” I said. “And I need it delivered ASAP.”

“Where to?”

“Pine City.”

He let out a long whistle. “You did it.” He was impressed.

“How soon can you get a truck up here?”

“I can get Terry to do it, probably on Tuesday, maybe Wednesday.”

Rattling off my list and confirming the quantities took another twenty-five minutes and cost over twenty-two thousand dollars, plus fifteen hundred for delivery. Jonah dutifully took it all down, and at the end, he said Good for you, and I could hear his smile.

“Hey, Jonah?” I asked, right before we hung up.

“Yeah?”

“Don’t tell anybody, okay?”

He paused. My whole body tensed.

“Buy me a drink sometime,” he said. “And we’ll be even.”

This time it was my smile you could hear through the phone.