Why Was I Doing It, Maybe Because

He built the house in ten months. Now he can’t finish the kitchen.The kitchen isn’t a kitchen yet. It’s a wall of bare studs, a pencil line where the counter will go someday, and an overturned bucket where a man sits most evenings with a nail he can drive in three swings and no reason to drive it.He and his wife sold everything, moved their kids to the end of a long lane in the cold North and built a life that doesn’t need the bank, the grid, or a boss. It worked. Power, water, food in the freezer, bills down to almost nothing. Every need that used to get him out of bed, he went out and handled. And now nothing gets him out of bed.The phone keeps ringing with other people’s kitchens, and the price he raised to scare them off only made them want him more. A guy at the hardware counter says must be nice. A doctor twenty hours into his shift stitches up their son at one in the morning. A neighbour trades a case of oranges for three dozen eggs. And an eight-dollar bag of chips has him standing in the aisle wondering whether he’s allowed.Across one winter, in twenty-four short chapters, a husband and wife talk it through on the unfinished subfloor while the windowsill fills with the evidence: a bent nail, a broken shear pin, a hospital bracelet, an orange peel kept all in one piece. Is he lazy, or tired? Resting, or quitting? Was the fire ever his, or did the snow strike the match?'Lazy is a verdict. Not yet is a question.'Told almost entirely in dialogue, Why Was I Doing It, Maybe Because is for anyone who got the thing they were chasing and woke up wondering what to call what’s missing. It doesn’t hand down a verdict. It sits on the bucket with him and looks.