A letter from Papaw — Before light. Drizzle on the windshield. Ford idling rough in the drive.

I'm going to tell you a thing I've carried fifty-some years and never put down for anybody to see.

Saw a name in last Sunday's paper. Fella I went through school with — hadn't laid eyes on him in fifty years, but I knew the name the second I saw it. Set my coffee down and read it twice.

He and I worked one summer together before I hired on at the mill. Roofing. Hot work, the kind that gets in your shirt and stays there. And I'll tell you what I did that I've never told a soul. There was a stretch on a house out by the river — back side, up under the eaves, place nobody was ever going to climb up and check — where I laid the shingles fast and didn't set the nails proper. Skipped the third nail on a whole run of them. Boss wasn't looking. Homeowner wasn't looking. I was seventeen and tired and it was Friday, and I told myself the roof'd hold and went home and drank a Coca-Cola on the porch.

The roof probably did hold. Wasn't the roof that was the problem.

Been driving the Ford down to Asheville once a month for parts near thirty years. Same run, same road. And every time I pass the turnoff out toward the river I think of that house. Fifty-some years and I still think of it. Not the shingles. The seventeen-year-old boy who decided nobody was looking so it didn't count.

A pair of hands don't know which nails are the ones somebody's going to see. They just know how you taught them to work. The hands I skipped those nails with are the same hands I built the shed with, the same hands held Ruth's, the same hands are wrapped around this coffee cup, and I have been trying for fifty years to teach them a different way and they still remember. That's the whole of it. You skip the nail on the back of the roof and the hands know, and the hands are the ones you have to live with.

I hear tires on the gravel. Earl, most likely, needing something.