There are things Ray Calloway knew how to do with his hands that most men his age could not.
He could thread a pipe in the dark, by feel alone, in the crawl space beneath a house built before the war. He could identify the sound of a failing water heater from two rooms away. He could read the pressure in a system the way a doctor reads a pulse, one hand on the fitting, head tilted, already knowing the answer before the gauge confirmed it. Twenty-two years of plumbing had given him hands that were thick and scarred and reliable, hands that had never failed him in a practical sense, hands that could solve almost any problem involving water and metal and force.
Continue on the next page:
