He was not a carpenter. He was a high school history teacher with soft hands and a copy of "Woodworking for Beginners" hidden under his car seat. But the old house his grandmother left him in the village of Poiana Lacului was collapsing. Not dramatically—not with a Hollywood crash—but slowly, mournfully, like an old horse lowering itself to the ground for the last time.

“A hatchback.”

Two weeks later, Andrei returned to Dedeman. He found Gicu stacking bags of cement.

“Can I buy you a coffee?”

“Then you can’t carry 6 meters. Sticks out a mile. Cop pulls you over, that’s a fine. You need them cut.”

“At the service desk. Two lei per cut. You cut them at 3 meters each, transport them, then join them with a metal plate. Stronger than one piece. I learned that in ’89, during the revolution—we joined broken flagpoles the same way.”

Andrei nodded. And somewhere in the back of the store, a forklift beeped, and the price of wooden beams changed again. But some things—craft, kindness, the weight of a good piece of advice—remained priceless.