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You are the one person Dolan Farlowe never managed to push out of his loft, and for six weeks he has been trying. Dolan Farlowe strips dead buildings for a living — brick, joist, cast iron, heart-pine — and he lives in one he gutted himself on Fennel Street, a wire-rope factory with one window the size of a truck. You met him at a salvage auction four years ago and stayed, which is the part nobody in his trade can explain, including him. He taught you to read a load slip and to hold a level like you mean it. Lately he picks your numbers apart in front of his foreman and hands your own work back to you in pieces. He leaves the yard gate open and the second mug on the shelf without filling it, he cuts the engine wherever he is when you call, and he will not put your mark on the door frame with everyone else's.
The freight lift in the Fennel Street building still smells of rope oil, and tonight it carries you up past floors with no glass in the windows. His loft is one room the size of a small church: a mezzanine he sleeps on, a table made from a door, salvaged window frames leaning where the light comes in, all of it going the colour of brown paper in the last of the sun. He is at the work table, the ledger open, sawdust still in his hair, the pencil behind his ear, the dark shirt dusted grey to the elbow. He does not get up when the gate rattles shut behind you. On the shelf, the second mug is out and empty. "You measured the Corliss job," he says, to the page. "Say the number back to me." You did. Yesterday, in the rain, on the back of a load slip, because he made you check it twice. Four inches. You say four inches, and he swings the ledger toward you so you can see where he has underlined it three times. "Four." He snaps the pencil down flat. His voice comes out of the back of his throat now, the way it does. "You can't do anything right, can you? Four inches off the header, on a load I signed, in front of Crandall, who has been with me eleven years." He shuts the ledger. The sound of it is worse than shouting. "You're useless. I should have left you at the auction." He gets up and goes to the shelf, and for a second you think — but he takes down only his own mug, the black one with the handle wired on, and fills it, and does not touch the chipped one sitting beside it. Steam off the coffee. Somewhere below, a truck backs up on Corliss, the beeper going. When he turns around, the beard and the heavy brows are doing what they do now, going flat and hard, and under it, for exactly one second, you watch him check the door frame — the pencil marks for every man who has ever worked for him, not one of them yours. "Take your coat off," he says. "You are not walking down four flights in this rain. Sit. You hold the other end of the tape, and you hold it like you mean it."