Ray stood at the back of his truck and didn't look at the trowel, but Darnell kept touching it the way a kid touches a new watch. The supply house doors were propped open with a cinderblock and cold air rolled out across the asphalt. Ray pulled his own trowel from his belt - the handle almost black, the blade nicked on one edge from a job in 2009 - and turned it once in his hand, then put it back.
Darnell dragged the mixing paddle in slow circles, the gray slop climbing the sides of the bucket like it was thinking about leaving. Ray watched the consistency go past oatmeal - past gravy, headed somewhere between the two that would slide off a back-wall tile at eleven o'clock and take three others with it. He crouched next to the unopened bag of thinset and read the back of it, the part with the water ratios, even though he'd known those numbers since Gerald Ford was president. Then he picked up a clean bucket and set it beside his knee, and he didn't say anything - and the paddle kept circling.
Darnell set the third tile and Ray could already see it - a gap on the left side fat enough to catch a fingernail. The kneepads Ray had lent him were too big and he kept sliding forward on them, nudging each tile a hair as he caught himself. Ray pressed his thumb to the subfloor where a chalk line would have started and felt the grit of old adhesive under his nail. He picked up a tile spacer from the bucket lid and turned it in his fingers, and then he set it back down.
Ray pulled the margin chisel from the side pocket of his bag and held it out handle-first, the black electrical tape on the grip gone shiny from ten years of palms. Darnell looked at the row, then at the chisel - then set the blade against the first tile and drove it with his fist. The crack came up hollow and wrong, the tile skidding into the pile of broken thinset at his knees, and then the next one, and the next, each pop bouncing off the bare drywall while Ray sat on the toilet lid with his elbows on his thighs and watched the floor come apart the way he already knew it would.
Ray sat on the overturned bucket in the hallway and turned the broken tile face-down against his palm - the yellow adhesive dried in the same small ridges he remembered picking at on a floor in Decatur in 1987 while Gerald Simms watched him from the doorway and said nothing. He pressed his thumbnail into one ridge until a chip of it came off and stuck under his nail. From the bathroom came the sound of Darnell stacking the broken pieces, the hollow knock of ceramic on ceramic, and then a pause, and then the same sound again. Ray set the tile on his knee and looked at the water stain on the baseboard across the hall and left it there.
Darnell pinched the triangle between two fingers, the broken edge still pale where the glaze hadn't reached - and slid it into the front pocket of his work pants without looking at Ray. Ray watched the pocket settle. He reached into the cab later for his level and his knuckle caught the ashtray lid, which hadn't latched right since 2003, and it dropped open the way it always did, and the shard of terra cotta he'd carried out of a kitchen in Marietta was right there on top of the parking stubs, the corner of it worn smooth from the one spot where he'd touched it maybe a thousand times.
Ray drove back through the intersection where the new tile showroom had gone in over the old transmission shop - and when the light caught the window display he saw the porcelain laid out in a herringbone pattern, the kind that took twice as long and forgave nothing, and he remembered the first time he'd tried it, a hallway in Smyrna, and how Gerald had come back two days later and stood in the doorway and not said a single word about the lip he could see from the street. At the next red light Ray opened the glovebox for a pen and found instead the folded estimating sheet from Darnell's first solo bid - the numbers in a handwriting that pressed too hard, the labor column short by a third. He smoothed it against the steering wheel once with his thumb and put it back. The light changed and he drove, and he didn't call.
Ray found the level in the truck bed the next morning, the four-foot aluminum with the cracked vial he'd been meaning to replace since the Buckhead job, left there instead of his toolbox where Darnell had set it down. He picked it up and looked through the crack - the bubble sitting just off center, and then he slid it back under the tie-down strap the way he always had. His phone showed a text from Darnell sent at 6:40 in the morning - a photo, tile floor, no caption - and Ray zoomed in on the grout lines until he could see they were straight, straighter than yesterday - and the new trowel was on the cement board beside Darnell's knee, still too clean. Ray set the phone face-down on the seat and picked up his coffee and drank it.
Ray stopped at the supply house for grout and found Darnell already at the counter, the new trowel on the glass beside his elbow, the blade scratched now in three places that hadn't been there yesterday. He was asking the counter guy about notch size, running his finger along the edge of a display card the way Ray had watched him run it along the tile - feeling for something he didn't have a name for yet. Ray picked up a float from the rack beside the door and read the label he didn't need to read. He paid for his grout and carried it out and sat in the truck a full minute before he started it, the bag between his boots, the receipt folded once and left on the dash.
Ray drove to the Darnell job on Thursday to drop off the bag of unsanded grout he'd pulled from the wrong shelf, and the front door was accessed, and he went in. The bathroom floor was done - all of it - grouted and wiped, the new trowel laid across the bucket lid with a rag folded under the blade the way Ray had shown him once without explaining why. Ray crouched and pressed his thumbnail into a grout line near the toilet base and it held, and he moved to the next one, and the next, his knees popping in the quiet - and somewhere in the middle of that row he found a line that ran just slightly wide, a hair of extra grout the sponge had missed, and he left his thumbnail in it a moment longer than he needed to. He set the unsanded bag by the door on his way out and didn't leave a note.
