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“Thanks, Momma, I’m quite comfortable where I am.” She rose from the chair and twirled again, the yellow skirt fanning out farther this time until he saw a hem of green. He set aside his wrenches and lay down to watch.
    It would be a long time before he saw another play—more than sixty years, in fact. But that week he ended up seeing the one she was rehearsing—it was by Oscar Wilde. And a month later he joined the navy. Then he spent two years in the Pacific, maintaining the hydraulics of the cruiser
Louisville
. In the South China Sea near the end of his tour, a pair of kamikazes hit the ship, and what he found himself remembering as smoke filled the engine room was the view he’d once had through a rectangular hole in the ceiling, that girl’s auburn hair against the green ribbon.
    When the rehearsal was over he’d climbed down and come in the rear door of the stage. There was an electrical panel there. He stood in front of it, screwing and unscrewing a fuse, until finally she walked out of the dressing room. She was in her regular school clothes.
    “Would you see me sometime?” he said.
    She glanced at him. “Why would I want to do that?”
    “Because you’re beautiful.”
    “That’s not a reason.”
    “Because I’m going over, then.”
    She pointed at his boots. “You’re getting tar on the stage.”
    “Excuse me,” he said. He bent down to clean it up. “Would you?”
    “You don’t even know my name.”
    “Would you tell it to me?”
    “All right. Anna.”
    “Anna What?”
    “Anna Bainbridge.”
    “Would you, then, Anna Bainbridge?”
    “I have no interest.”
    “What if I came to the play?”
    She looked at his boots again. “I don’t think you’d like it.”
    “I might surprise you.”
    “Then come, if you want. It’s a free country.”
    “Are you sure?”
    “Yes, I’m sure.” She pointed. “You didn’t get all the tar.”
    He bent down again.
    “I’m Grange Sifter,” he said when he stood.
    And a little more than a decade later, when my father had returned to Saline, Anna Bainbridge Sifter—after a stillbirth and a late miscarriage of twins—had me.

    I T WAS AT THE G ROTON NAVY YARD, where he was posted after his tour on the USS
Louisville
, that my father first gained the attention of one of Liam Metarey’s foremen, and from the day he returned to Saline, his work was on Metarey rentals. The rentals were solid, handsome houses in a way that seems to have vanished today in all but the most genteel neighborhoods, with deep front porches shaded by red oaks, corniced eaves that formed rain shadows around the foundations, and signature brick steps in a diamond pattern bordered in herringbone. When I was a kid, those corniced eaves were still being built by one set of my uncles, and those brick steps were still being laid by another. The Metareys were able to go to great lengths to keep up their neighborhoods, in part because they owned the lumber mills and the brick furnace and the ironworks, but also in part because they employed men like my father and his brothers, who were more or less permanently at their call.
    At the beginning of high school, I began carrying around the hand furnace that my father used for packing lead joints. This was my Saturday job. By 1970, you probably couldn’t find a dozen lead-jointed pipes within fifty miles of Saline, but my father taught me how to pack them anyway. The furnace was a bulb of steel the size of a lantern, with a check valve and an air knob that mixed the gas into a hissing jet of flame. I scorched the lead in a melting pot until it changed from black to silver and finally to cherry red; then I poured it. He kept me well aware of the dangers: the fumes would addle me; the lead had to pour like soup or the joint would leak; a wet fitting could explode. I carried his caulking irons and packing, too, and the coils of oakum that left my fingernails reeking of tar. Before I left for school every Monday, I checked my hands for