Making Toast Read Online Free PDF

wife.
     
    Back in Quogue, I meet with Kevin Stakey, the contractor Ginny and I hired to turn the garage into a playhouse for the grandchildren. We wanted a place where they could paint, work with clay, race cars, transform Transformers, and fight over card games like Uno and War. The plans were made in the late summer, with Amy, Harris, Carl, Wendy, and John involved. After Amy died, creating the playhouse became therapy for me. I hoped she would approve. It was my way of bringing her back to life. Because I could not understand why she died, I sought to make other things less confusing. I cleaned out junk-closets, gave order to a chaotic shelf of CDs, and cleared an ivy-choked area of the yard.
    Kevin is in his late forties and built like a substantial piece of rope, the kind that ties ships to piers. He has a large head and a mustache and a beard on his chin, thick as a shoe brush. Shorter than I, at about five-foot, nine inches, he is twice as wide. When we shake hands, mine disappears in his. He took the news about Amy as if he had known her. I tell him that, because of our changed circumstances, I will not be around that much. He will have to make many decisions about the playhouse on his own.
    “No problem,” he says.
    “Of course, if you screw up, I’ll make you do it over.”
    “No problem.”
    “And don’t fool around with the Yankees grill cover,” I tell him. It was a Christmas gift from Harris. A Mets fan, Kevin has threatened to loosen the ties so that the wind would carry it away.
    The building of the playhouse proceeded with little help needed from me. Kevin converted the garage by exposing the old beams of the original stable, putting up sheetrock, remaking the old windows, and replacing the dirty, cracked cement floor with gleaming wood. When he finished, I told him the brown of the wood had too much orange in it. “Can you fix it?”
    “No problem,” he said.
    “Tell me, Kevin. If I asked you to turn the playhouse upside down, so the kids could enter from the roof, would that be a problem?”
    “No problem,” he said. He sanded the prestained floor down to the wood, and made it the darker color I wanted.
     
    Harris’s introduction to the family occurred in Quogue shortly before he and Amy became engaged. Amy had had a parade of boyfriends in high school and college, one of whom was “serious”—a genial, laid-back athlete who fitted in with us comfortably. We liked him and his family, and could picture Amy married to him in a seamless extension of their easygoing companionship. But whatever little thought I gave to their future suggested that theirs would not have been a marriage of people who improved each other or teased each other gainfully or made each other alert to the world’s surprises, pleasant, foolish, and tragic. I never went so far as to picture them having children.
    But when Harris entered Amy’s life, and ours, here was a husband, a father, and a man full grown. For Carl, John, and me, he was instantly recognizable as one of the guys, but there was something else he had, like a secret soul. Exceptional people are sometimes freakish. Harris seemed to have planed the edges of his exceptional qualities so as to prevent them from being offensive to others or isolating to himself. I see something similar in Sammy, as he tries to find a middle ground between his private silences and his fun. Harris walked into our house bringing not a perfectly fitting piece of the puzzle, but rather an eccentric enlargement of the whole. Wendy had had the same effect on us a year or so earlier.
    Not that any of that stood in the way of the men of the house from turning Harris’s introduction into a hazing. We swept him into our sloppy-yet-brutal game of two-on-two basketball, in which he held his own in terms of both sloppiness and brutality. Then came the essay question. Carl was a rabid fan of Patrick Ewing, the New York Knicks center. He named his yellow lab Ewing. I liked the dog but