“Romeo,” I said, catching him halfway through the meal. “I told you to make those boards twenty-nine inches.”

“I did,” he said. “Two feet, three inches.”

Sam opened his mouth and then clamped it shut without saying a word.

“Why?” Romeo asked.

“Because you cut them short,” I said. “Two feet, three inches . . . can’t you add? That’s twenty-seven, not twenty-nine. How could you make a mistake like that?”

“I thought . . .”

“You didn’t even have to add. Just read the numbers on the tape measure.”

“You were using it. I used a ruler.”

“A foot ruler? Of all the numskull . . .”

“Hey, Moss,” Apple said, “it was just a few boards.”

The distress on his face—and the misery on Romeo’s—caught me up short. What had got into me?

“I’m really sorry, Moss,” Romeo said.

“Forget it,” I told him. “It was just a few boards. I should have done them myself.”

Then it was Nate looking undecided about saying something that he ended up keeping to himself.

And Pops, eating down at the end of the table, didn’t say anything, either.

I thought on it while I was cutting new boards and kept thinking the rest of the day. Truth to tell, I didn’t know why I’d jumped on Romeo the way I had. Those boards weren’t a big thing.

I guessed maybe I’d just been mad at myself for depending on him to start with. It was like my pa had always said: If you want a job done right, do it yourself.

That was back before he stopped doing any job at all, of course.

The thing was, every time I looked across the room and saw Romeo, his good nature knocked to pieces, I felt like I was the one who’d been doing the letting down.

Finally, late in the day, I asked him to help me place some cabinet hinges.

“Aw, you better get somebody else,” he said. “Hinges are tricky.”

“I know,” I said. “That’s why the job’s going to take four hands.”

“You got it marked where they’ll go?”

“Yeah. But you can check me.”

Later on, after work, Pops caught up with me. “Glad you fixed that mistake,” he said.

“Cutting the extra boards wasn’t anything,” I said. “Sorry about the wasted wood, though.”

“We’ll find a use for it. But those short boards weren’t the mistake I was talking about.”

I said, “Oh.”

Chapter 15

Even if I was in the clear with Pops again, his criticism from the day before still stung.

So at break time later that morning, when a snow squall had everyone drinking their coffee under the canvas shelter where the work plans were laid out, I declined to join a card game.