When the ice cream came out, Cody set down his tongs and told Wade that he and Mr. Heinz had signed something Tuesday, and old Mr. Heinz stood up and unfolded the papers he had slid under his plate, and held them up for the whole barbecue to see.
They were partnership papers. Mr. Heinz, who has framed houses in Boise for fifty years and has no children of his own, was making my grandson his partner, and, the papers spelled out, his successor. In five years the whole outfit, the trucks, the crews, the name, would be Codys.
My grandson was not just swinging a hammer for somebody elses name on the truck, he was about to have his own name on every truck, because the old man who owned the company had been watching that boy work and decided there was nobody he trusted more to carry it on.
Mr. Heinz told the barbecue, in his slow careful way, that in fifty years he had never seen a young man frame a wall truer or treat the other men better, and that a business is not the name on the truck, it is the hands that do the work, and Codys were the best hands he had ever hired.
Wade, the regional manager with the Tesla he talks to like a person, did not have a college joke left. He looked at those partnership papers and the number at the bottom, and he went quiet.
Cody did not rub it in. He shook Mr. Heinzs hand, and then he turned to Wade and said, no hard feelings, Uncle Wade. You were right that somebody has got to build the houses. Turns out it is going to be my company that builds them.
The cousins who laughed at Wades toast were clapping now, for Cody. I taught that boy to hold a hammer when he was five. I stood there at seventy-some years old watching him become a partner and a boss, and I had to look at the sky a minute so nobody would see my eyes.
Cody still gets to the site at six a.m. with sawdust in his hair. He still rebuilt my back steps for nothing but the joy of it. But there is a set of partnership papers in Mr. Heinzs safe now with my grandsons name on them, and in five years that name goes on every truck in the yard. Somebody has got to build the houses, Wade said. My grandson is about to own the company that does.