Part One•Section XXXV•Paragraph 1

Talisker nudged his hand and leaned against his leg as Rennie stood looking at the front of the house, thinking about how he had tentatively touched the newly painted deck, just as his father had gently tested the surface of the boat, to be sure it was dry.  If he hurried, he had calculated, it [...]

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One•XXXIV•4

Rennie’s father had shown him how to prime the model, once it was mostly completed, and had let the boy try his hand at varnishing and painting.
“All it takes,” John had told him, “is a concentrated gaze and a steady hand.”
After varnishing the deck and mast, they had applied strips of masking tape to define [...]

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One•XXXIV•3

     A few days into the project, Rennie’s sister had put on a record with the Beach Boys singing “Sloop John B.” Rennie and his father had gleefully sung along, altering the lyrics ad libitum (and so adding to the general, and atypical in their household, hilarity):
We come on the Sloop John A…
Each [...]

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One•XXXIV•2

     One Friday night, though, early in the autumn of their year Stateside, Rennie’s father had arrived home with a gift for him, a large, rectangular box wrapped in kraft paper.  This was notably uncharacteristic: his father wasn’t an impulsive man, he rarely gave presents (except for crisp bills tucked into Hallmark cards that [...]

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Part One•Section XXXIV•Paragraph 1

    Rennie had been born in the early sixties, yet his father, even in the mid-seventies (even, Rennie conceded, into this new millennium), was—with his starched shirts, pressed suits and silk ties—the embodiment of the fifties. When Rennie was young, his father had been reserved in both manner and habit, getting up at five each morning, showering, [...]

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One•XXXIII•4

     Arden would be arriving home in two days and, he had figured, there would be just enough time before that to paint the porch deck and the two Adirondack chairs that he had found discarded at the side of the road earlier that summer.  Putting the finishing touches on the baluster’s post caps, [...]

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One•XXXIII•3

     The next morning, he had been awakened early by Talisker’s licking his hand.  He had brewed himself a mug of strong Assam tea and hewn a thick slice of dark, nutty Celtic loaf, which he had toasted and slathered with soft butter and fine-cut lime marmalade (with Arden and the girls away, there [...]

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One•XXXIII•2

     On arriving home, he had spread out a tarpaulin on the porch floor, set up a ladder and then, after carefully cutting in the edges of the beadboarded ceiling with Dimity, he had poured some of the thick cream-colored paint into a pan and started coating a small area with a roller that [...]

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Part One•Section XXXIII•Paragraph 1

     After trading email addresses with the salesperson (he had seemed a nice enough guy, after all, who mentioned in passing that he played the French horn in a local chamber music ensemble), Rennie had carried two gallons of paint, one each of Rectory Red—which Ron, the horn player, had convinced him to take [...]

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Part One•Section XXXII•Paragraph1

  When he returned to the store to purchase the paint, Rennie had felt a pang of disappointment to discover that the salesperson was a curt, tanned, middle-aged man, meticulously dressed in a crisp, short-sleeved, Borrowed Light shirt, chinos and expensive-looking moccasins, rather than the young woman with the Folly Green eyes and gentle, mellifluous voice whose hand [...]

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