Grant Holloway had believed, for most of his working life, that retirement would eventually sound like silence instead of sacrifice.
Forty years. That was the arithmetic of it. Forty years of overtime shifts and unpaid favors, of Christmases worked because the money was good, of vacations postponed until they quietly stopped being postponed and simply became things he had never done. He had built the whole structure of his life the way a man builds a wall, one course at a time, and he had done it so patiently that he barely noticed the years going by on the other side of it.
Then, at sixty-eight, with the last mortgage payment made and his tools packed in the bed of a truck that had two hundred and forty thousand miles on it, he went up the mountain.
The cabin took him three summers.
