“Good. Good-bye. Thank you anyway.”

“’Bye,” I said. I set Gerard’s phone down on the new stair tread, finished my sandwich, folded the wax paper up into a perfect square, and put it in my back pocket. I looked out at the neighborhood of neat, wood-frame houses with swing sets in their backyards. Eventually I stood up.

Instead of eating, Gerard was using the lunch hour to take a nap on the plywood subfloor of what would someday be the professor’s new bedroom. For a while I walked around, checking things that didn’t need to be checked, and at twelve-forty-five I went up and woke him. When he opened his eyes and saw me he said, “One more minute, Colonel, I was having the dream of dreams.”

Everything was the something of something with my friend. The dream of dreams, the woman of women, the divorce of divorces. He had a rough, honest-looking face, a difficult past, and the two sweetest young daughters in the world. In another minute he stood up, ate a pear, and we spent the afternoon cutting two-by-six studs for the walls of the upstairs rooms and nailing them in place.

“Let’s spruce things up, Colonel,” Gerard suggested at one point, because the two-by-sixes had been sawn from spruce trees.

“The professor would like that,” I said.

“The professor was in my dream. She was asking me to… well, I can’t say what she was asking me without the risk of offending community standards of decency.”

“We’re in a school zone, besides,” I said.

“The professor had given me a physics problem, I can say that much.”

“She’s a good professor. We like her particularly much.”

“Physics, biology, chemistry. All the sciences were involved. Latin, Spanish.”

“Italian?”

“Tongue of tongues.”

We went on for a while with this kind of nonsense, driving sixteenpenny nails one after the next through the sole plate and into the ends of the spruce two-by-sixes. When the walls were framed, and the light had softened to an early evening light, we packed our tools away in a safe place upstairs, stood around for a while looking at the work, asked each other what kind of plans we had for that night, shook hands, as we always did, and went home.