My name is Will Mercer.

I’m thirty-two now. But I was thirty-one when my little sister told me I wasn’t good enough to attend the wedding I’d helped make beautiful.I’m a welder outside Georgetown, Kentucky.

I build gates. I repair trailers. I make railings for porches and churches and the steps of old ladies who can’t get up them anymore without something to hold on to. I take whatever honest jobs come through the door of my shop.

For six years, that shop was half of a rented pole barn off Lemons Mill Road. Gravel floor. A tin roof that leaked in heavy rain. A wasp nest in the northeast corner that I’d learned to live with. We had an understanding. They stayed up there. I stayed down here.

The coffee was terrible. The heater was older than me. In January, I could see my breath until about ten in the morning.

But it was mine.The machine I used most was my father’s welder.

A Lincoln. Red. Ugly. Loud. So old that half the young welders I know wouldn’t touch it. They want inverters with digital screens. Lightweight. Quiet.

Dad’s Lincoln weighs four hundred pounds and hums like a tractor.

I call it the Old Man.Dad’s name was Danny Mercer.

He welded for a tank and trailer company in Lexington for thirty years. Big tankers. Grain trailers. Livestock haulers. He could lay a bead so straight you’d swear it was drawn with a ruler.

A heart attack took him the week before .

I was nineteen.He had thick fingers. Scarred knuckles. Burn marks up both forearms like freckles. And a white line across his left thumb where a grinder caught him in 1991.

When I was little, I’d sit on his lap after supper and trace those scars with my finger.

“How’d you get this one?”

“Shark,” he’d say.

“What about this one?”

“Bear.”

“And this one?”

He’d look across the kitchen at my mother.

“Your mama,” he’d say. “First time I tried to hold her hand.”

I hope he remembers what my mother finally told me.

Under an oak tree. In the dark. With string lights and two hundred and eight steel blossoms.