“Huh,” Dillon said.
“My thoughts exactly.”
Chairman Meow was as meek as a lamb for Dillon, and she scowled as she held the cat for Dillon to draw blood. The cat’s blood sugar was perfect. He checked the rest of the menagerie, and everyone was doing fine. Tessa reported that the donkey ate a tarp Tessa had used to cover the chicken feed, and he told her that was what donkeys did. Other than her manure having blue strands of plastic in it for a few days, Loretta would be fine.
He dropped his bag off in his truck, and spied Arlo, now standing by the workshop door. He headed toward the old man.
The workshop was set back from the house behind a row of apple trees just starting to bud. The outside was board-and-batten pine, weathered to the color of driftwood.
Arlo held his hat reverently in his hands, the way a man might hold it in church.
“Arlo.”
“Dillon.” Arlo stared at the door as he said heavily, “I haven’t been in here since Mick died.”
There wasn’t an answer to that, so Dillon folded his arms across his chest and waited. Brown Dog moved closer to Arlo and leaned against his leg. The old dog had a way of knowing when a person needed to feel his weight against them.
“Arlo, you don’t have to go in now?—”
“I know I don’t.” Arlo put his hat back on and reached for the padlock. “But it’s time.”
Withdrawing a keyring from his pocket, he popped the padlock and opened the door. Dillon followed him into Mick Lawrence’s workshop.
The place was clean and everything was in its place. A pencil even lay sharpened beside an unfinished box.
Dillon stood very still. Tessa’s husband might be long gone, but he still felt like he was standing in a room he had no right to be in.
Arlo walked to the pegboard, took down a hand plane, and turned it over in his fingers the way a man will turn over an old photograph. “Stanley No. 4. His grandpa gave him this one when for his twelfth birthday. Told him a plane is like a dog—if you take care of it, it’ll remember you.”
Dillon almost smiled. “That sounds like something you’d say.”
“Josiah Lawrence said a lot of things.” Arlo ran his thumb along the plane’s sole. “Most of them worth listening to.”
He put the tool down on the workbench. Then he reached for a steel toolbox tucked under the bench and rolled it out on its swivel wheels. He lowered himself onto an upturned crate beside the drawered box.
“Sit down, son.”
Dillon looked around and spied a rolling stool over by a table with whittling tools neatly stored in flat trays. He fetched it and sat.
“I’m going to teach you to use this shop,” Arlo said. “Fern and I talked about this place not long before she passed. She said the shop, the tools, needed using.”
“Arlo—” He stopped, unsure of what to say. He was a veterinarian. He could intubate a colicky horse or birth a calf in a driving snowstorm. But he did not, generally, know what to do when a grieving old man asked him to learn a craft like woodworking.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Arlo said. “You’re thinking you got no business in here. Wrong tools, wrong man, wrong shop.” He finally looked up. His pale eyes were clear. “I’m telling you, Mick wouldn’t mind. He’d want someone using this place. Looking after it.”
Yes, but did that include looking after the man’s wife? Dillon didn’t know what to say to that either, so he said nothing.
“We’re going to build Makayla a mounting block,” Arlo declared. “That child can’t get on June without climbing the fence rail, and one of these days the fence rail’s going to give out. She’s gonna hurt herself or I’m gonna have to haul her out of the mud. I’m too old for that.”
“That’s a good idea.” Dillon allowed. “I’m a fair hand with repairs around a house.” He looked around the shop. “But I don’t know anything about fancy woodworking.”
“A mounting block’s not fancy. Two steps and a top.” Arlo pulled out a tape measure. “You ever run a table saw?”
“In high school shop class. Closing in on twenty years ago.”
“Then you’ll remember how by lunch.”
Arlo was a patient teacher, which Dillon hadn’t expected. He showed Dillon how to pick a board by sighting down the edge for a bend or flaw. He demonstrated how to draw cut lines with a square, then he handed Dillon a pencil from the can of pencils and said, “Your turn.”