Instead I went over to the blueprints, which were stretched out on a plank laid across sawhorses. I moved one of the rocks that were anchoring them down, so I could read the legend under it. SHOWER HOUSE.

I studied the ruler-straight white lines, some dashed and some solid, and the neat, slanted numerals that were everywhere. I didn’t see how anybody made sense of them.

Though of course that was what Beatty thought about the radio schematics I followed, back at the airport in Texas. “It’s a mystery to me,” she once said, “how you can turn a diagram that’s all lines and notations into the insides of a radio.”

I’d told her, “It’s no harder than those airplane maintenance manuals you’re always poring over.”

A burst of talk interrupted my recollections. Nate was looking openmouthed surprised while the others were glad-handing Apple over a pinochle trick he’d just swiped from under Nate’s nose.

I guess you can learn anything if you want to bad enough, I thought.

I identified a few offset lines as doors and windows and was puzzling over some symbols when Pops came in to call everyone back to work.

He looked over my shoulder at the symbol near where my finger was resting. “Electrical outlet,” he said. “And that one there”—he pointed to a line that alternated long dashes with short ones—“that’s for a hot water line.”

At break time that afternoon, and at the next and the next, I returned to the blueprints, and gradually they became less mysterious. I knew I was getting them right when Pops had the guys cut a stack of twelve two-by-twelves down to boards eleven feet seven inches long.

Floor joists, I said to myself, picturing where I’d seen that eleven feet seven inches on the blueprints. Sure enough, once the lumber was cut, Pops said, “Okay, let’s go make us a floor.”

It made me feel downright competent.

And almost as pleased with myself as when I came up with an idea for Romeo.

Fall was on the run by now, and in the mornings we needed a fire in the wood-burning Sibley stove in our tent.

It was such a stubborn, ill-tempered contraption we gave it a name—Bad Beulah—and daily wasted time groaning and arguing about whose turn it was to get out of bed first and feed fuel into her.

One especially chilly morning we put off even the arguing with a discussion about all the things we wished the mess sergeant would make for breakfast. His standbys were pancakes and oatmeal, which we’d been eating, one on one day and the other on the next, without letup.

“I could eat scrambled eggs with bacon done crisp but the fat still chewy,” Apple said. “And hush puppies.”

“Brook trout, pan fried,” Nate suggested.