“Like?”

Gary cut off another piece of steak and used it for punctuation. “Like, they put up teak paneling, and stained all the trim mahogany and took down the old kitchen shelves and put the new ones up wrong. In the bathroom, they walled off the window and put in a six-hundred-dollar wall-hung toilet, which leaked. Lucky there wasn’t any insulation between the floors.”

“Why lucky?”

“Man, I’m going to be able to hire you on as an apprentice, you keep this up. Lucky because instead of pooling near and rotting the floor joists-”

“What’s a joist?”

“Same thing as a truss, only under the floor instead of the roof.” Gary reflected. “Well. Sort of. Same principle, anyway, supporting the structure. So, the water from the leak migrated down and only ruined the Sheetrock in the downstairs bathroom.”

“So what did you do?”

“I gutted it right down to the studs, renewed all the plumbing. I closed off the door to the hallway, made it a master bath. I put the window back in-I love glass brick-and took out the wall-hung toilet and replaced it with a floor-mounted one. I built new cabinets-maple slab, looks great, if I sez it who shouldn’t-and laid down new linoleum. Now it looks about twice as big and feels ten times as light as it did before, and everything’s new and done right. That bathroom’s good for thirty years.” His grin was not modest. He cut another piece of steak and inserted it into his mouth as if he were receiving the Year’s Best Contractor award.

“You like doing that?”

Gary chewed while he thought. “Yeah,” he said, swallowing. “It’s fun to take something that’s messed up and straighten it out, make it right again. You should have seen this woman; you’d have thought I was some kind of magician. She acted like she hadn’t had to pay for it, like I’d given her a gift. Like I said, it’s fun. Except I’m allergic to mahogany,” he added, shaking his head, “and I sneezed all the way through the remodel. But other than that. It was fun.”