POV: Cal
The kitchen soffit was going to be a conversation.
Cal stood on the six-foot ladder and pressed his palm flat against the soffit board and felt the give in it — soft in the middle, firm at the edges, the particular texture of wood that had been wet and dried and wet again over years, holding its shape from habit rather than integrity. The cabinet above the refrigerator had pulled slightly from the wall on the left side, a quarter inch gap that was easy to miss if you weren't looking for it but that told the whole story if you were. Water had gotten in somewhere above — probably the flashing around the kitchen vent — worked its way down through the soffit, dried, worked its way down again, and the wood had done what wood did when nobody was watching.
He'd need to open it up and see what was behind it before he could give Savannah a real answer on timeline and cost.
"It's worse than I said yesterday," he called down.
She was at the table with her laptop and what he estimated was her third coffee of the morning, doing whatever it was she was doing that she kept minimizing the screen for when he came through the kitchen, which he registered and chose not to comment on. She looked up.
"How much worse?"
"I won't know until I open it. Could be surface. Could be the cabinet box itself." He pressed again, felt the give. "The flashing on the vent is the source, I think. I'll get on the roof this afternoon and check."
"The roof." She said it with the precise flatness of someone doing math.
"I'll let you know what I find before I do anything." He came down the ladder and moved it to check the soffit run on the other side of the cabinet. "It may not change the cost significantly. Depends on what's behind the board."
She made a note on the legal pad next to her laptop — she kept a legal pad, he'd noticed, handwritten notes in a small, precise script that matched how she talked. He didn't look at what she wrote. "Okay," she said. "Let me know."
He moved the ladder.
She went back to her laptop.
The red beans had been doing their low simmer for three hours by now and the kitchen smelled of it — andouille and thyme and the sweet depth of the trinity softened down to something almost caramelized. It was a smell that did specific things to a person who'd grown up in south Louisiana, things that operated below the level of thought, at the level of the body's oldest memories. He had not mentioned this. He was not going to mention this.
He set the ladder under the second soffit run and climbed.
The morning had a rhythm to it that he hadn't expected and that he was being careful not to find too comfortable.
She worked. He worked. Occasionally one of them needed something from the other — her laptop charger was plugged into the outlet he needed for the oscillating saw, which he asked her about and she moved without complaint; he tracked a fine line of drywall dust across the kitchen floor he hadn't noticed, which she pointed out without making it a thing, just put it there so he knew. They moved around each other in the kitchen with the particular spatial awareness of two people who'd decided, independently, to be practical about the situation.
It was working fine. It was entirely professional.
He was up the ladder working the oscillating saw along the soffit edge when she came to refill her coffee and stopped at the stove to check the beans and he caught, in his peripheral vision, the way she lifted the lid and leaned over the pot and the steam came up and she closed her eyes for just a second — not dramatically, not anything she'd meant for anyone to see, just a private moment of something that might have been pleasure or might have been grief or might have been both, the way smells from the right kitchen at the right moment could be both.
He looked back at the soffit.
The oscillating saw found the edge of the soffit board and he ran it clean along the pencil line, and when he pulled the board away from the framing he saw what he'd hoped not to see: the cabinet box on the left side had soft rot in the lower corner, not structural, contained, but it meant replacing that section of the cabinet box before he could re-sheath the soffit. Two extra hours of work, maybe three.
"Okay," he called down, because she'd asked him to let her know. "Cabinet box has some rot in the lower corner. I can cut out the affected section and sister in new material. Doesn't change the timeline significantly."
She came to the foot of the ladder and looked up. He was holding the damaged section so she could see it.
She looked at it the way she looked at everything — with full attention, reading it rather than just registering it. "Is that common? In houses this age?"
"In kitchens, yes. Moisture from cooking, from the dishwasher — " he nodded toward the dishwasher, an older model that had been installed sometime in the late nineties, not original to the house. "These houses weren't designed with modern appliances in mind. The ventilation was never adequate once you put a dishwasher in."
"So it's been happening for twenty years."
"Roughly."
She absorbed this. "And nobody noticed."
"It's in the soffit. You'd have to be looking for it." He paused. "I noticed it about a year ago. I've been monitoring it."
She looked up at him. He held the piece of damaged cabinet box in one hand and her gaze in the other and neither required particular effort.
"You've been making a list," she said.
"Of what needed doing. Yes."
"Of everything that needed doing."
"That's generally how a list works."
Something shifted in her expression — not quite a smile, not quite its opposite. She looked at the damaged wood a moment longer. "Alright. Do what it needs."
She went back to the table.
He took his lunch on the back porch steps.
This was habit — he ate outside when he could, had done since his apprenticeship days when his uncle had said a man who eats his lunch indoors is a man who hasn't earned it yet, which was probably not a real philosophy but had stuck anyway. He'd brought a roast beef po'boy from the Gas-N-Go, which was not as good as the one from Guidry's but Guidry's was on the other side of town and he didn't want to leave the work mid-morning.
He was two bites in when the back door opened and she came out with a bowl.
She stopped when she saw him. He had the distinct impression she'd expected the porch to be unoccupied.
"Sorry," she said. "I was just — the beans are done."
The bowl was full of red beans and rice, the beans a deep brick red, a piece of andouille resting on the side of the bowl. She'd done them right — not too thick, not too thin, the rice separate and not stirred in, the way he'd grown up eating them.
"How'd they turn out?" he said.
She sat on the far end of the steps — there was enough distance between them to be comfortable and not enough to be pointed. She dipped the spoon. He watched her try the first bite in the way a person tried something they'd made and weren't sure about, the brief internal assessment, and then the slight release of tension in her shoulders that meant it was right.
"My grandmother's recipe," she said. "More or less. I don't have it written down. I was just —" She stopped. "Going by memory."
"Tastes like it's right."
She looked at him sideways. "You can't know that. You've never had her recipe."
"I had her red beans three times," he said. "She fed me lunch when I was working on the roof two summers ago."
Savannah looked at him. He kept his eyes on the middle distance.
"She never mentioned that," she said.
"We ate on this porch. She talked about you."
The air shifted between them. Not dramatically. The way air shifted when a window opened somewhere in the house — a change in pressure, subtle and immediate.
"What did she say?" Savannah asked. Her voice was level but he heard what was underneath it — the specific hunger of a person asking about someone they missed.
He thought about it honestly. "She said you had her eye for what mattered. That you could look at something — a place, a person — and see what it was actually made of, not what it was pretending to be." He paused. "She said she wished you'd use it on yourself occasionally."
Savannah looked at the yard.
He went back to his po'boy.
After a moment she said, quietly, "That sounds exactly like her."
"Yes ma'am."
She ate her beans. He ate his sandwich. A squirrel moved through the fig tree and achieved something in the branches and left again. Down the alley, a screen door slapped open and a child called something and was called back. The sound of the neighborhood doing what it did on a Monday, ordinary and continuous.
"You grew up here," she said. Not a question.
"Born and raised. Left for school — architecture, Tulane — came back."
"You didn't want to stay in New Orleans?"
He considered this honestly. "I did, for a while. New Orleans has everything. But there's something about coming back to a place that knew you. The work here —" He looked at the house, the back of it, the framing he understood down to its decisions. "Nobody else was going to do this work. These houses needed someone who understood what they were, not just what they could be converted into."
She was looking at the back of the house now too. "You see them as worth saving."
"They are worth saving."
"Not everyone would agree."
"No." He finished the last of the po'boy. "But they're wrong."
She made a sound that was not quite a laugh and not quite not one. "That's very certain."
"Some things are."
She looked at him then — the direct, reading look, the one he'd noticed she deployed when she was actually interested in something and wasn't managing the fact of being interested. He let her look. He had nothing to hide in his face on this particular subject.
"Do you ever photograph them?" she asked. "The houses. Before and after."
"I document them, for the historical archive. Not — not the way you mean."
"What way do I mean?"
"Like they're worth looking at for their own sake. Not just for the record."
She was quiet for a moment. "Someone should."
He didn't say anything. She looked at the house again, and he saw something happening in her face — the thing he'd seen that morning when the steam came up from the beans, the thing she didn't know she was showing. He recognized it. He'd seen it in people who worked with old things long enough to love them, the specific ache of beauty that was also loss, things that were still here but aware of the way time was applying pressure.
She had her camera on the porch step beside her. She'd brought it out with the bowl, which he suspected was also habit, the camera coming along without a decision being made about it. She hadn't touched it. It sat on the step between them.
He looked at it and looked away.
"The roof this afternoon," he said, standing and gathering his trash. "I'll check the vent flashing and see what we're dealing with."
"I'll be inside," she said. "Working."
"I'll knock on the soffit from above so you know where I am."
She looked up at him with an expression he couldn't entirely read. "You knock on things to tell people where you are?"
"On roofs, yes. So nobody's startled when the ceiling starts making noise."
"That's —" She stopped. "That's considerate."
He took his trash inside and washed his hands at the kitchen sink and stood there a moment looking at the stovetop, the Dutch oven with its lid set slightly ajar, the beans having done their long morning work. She'd made enough for two. He didn't know if she'd thought about that, if it had been an automatic calculation or a deliberate one.
He was not going to think about which.
He got his tools together and went up to check the roof.
He was on the roof for forty minutes.
The vent flashing was the culprit — pulled away from the vent stack at the upper corner, a gap you'd miss from the ground but that had been funneling water in for years every time it rained at the right angle. A straightforward fix, an hour's work, materials he had in the truck. He documented it with his phone, crouched on the warm shingles in the afternoon sun, making the notes he'd make in the restoration file he kept for every house he worked.
He was making a note when he heard it.
The click and advance of a camera shutter.
He turned, one hand on the ridge, and she was in the yard below with her camera up — not pointing at him, or not primarily. She was shooting the back of the house, the roofline, the way the afternoon light hit the raised cottage profile, the gallery below. He was in the frame. He could see the angle.
She lowered the camera when she saw him turn.
They looked at each other across the distance — him on the roof, her in the yard, the afternoon light between them.
"Sorry," she said, and didn't look entirely sorry.
"Is that for the listing?" he said. "Realtors sometimes want —"
"No," she said. And then, as if the word had surprised her too: "No, it's not for the listing."
He held her gaze across the distance.
Then he turned back to his notes, and he heard the shutter click once more, and he did not turn around again, and the afternoon held them in its particular light — the house below him with its repaired yellow paint and its pier-and-beam bones and its decades of accumulated life — and he made his notes carefully and completely and did not examine, with any honesty, what it meant that he'd held still.