The house wasn’t that big. At least that’s what I kept telling myself in the dark hours of the nights I woke up alone. And I woke up alone every night. The nightmares were worse after I came back from visiting Allan.
I know he said I didn’t need to be there every weekend, that he could do this. But after two weeks, I felt the urge to check on him. When I showed up, he took the baseball from me and clutched it for all he was worth.
He was a strong soldier, and he was recovering, would make it to the other side. I had every faith that he would. I left Calvin’s baseball behind with Allan when I came home after that visit. But I brought the sucking blackness back with me.
I was beating back the trauma with a lot of sweat and cursing. The first night I could no longer sleep, I stripped the wallpaper from the walls in the bedroom that Ruby had stayed in. Down came decades of stale smoke and dirt. By the time dawn broke, I only had a few small patches that needed a scraper to finish removing the paper.
And with the opening of the workshop, I knew where scrapers were. That first day, I only pulled stuff down. I moved around the house and picked at the places where wallpaper was peeling. I didn’t have a plan, only that if I worked myself to the point of exhaustion, I might sleep.
Sleep came easily enough. It was the dreams that were the problems. But the harder I worked, the less I remembered having the nightmares. I still woke up at odd times, but more and more, I couldn’t remember what had woken me.
After a couple of days of being randomly destructive, I decided it was time to get a plan. A floorplan. I jumped on the computer and found a cheap program that would help me to ‘design my house’. I figured I could take measurements and plug them in, and the program could create a blueprint-style floor plan for me. And then I started taking measurements. I measured everything. Every nook and cranny. I even went up the treacherous stairs into the attic. Between being ancient and smaller than my feet, I had very real concerns that the stairs would collapse or I would simply slip and fall.
I could simply call an architectural firm to come and take measurements of this house. I could. But where was the fun in that? After hours of inputting measurements, I was beginning to wonder where the fun was in what I was doing.
I wanted the house restored, I wanted to be out in the woodworking shop getting all of that old equipment up and running so that I could try my hand at turning a piece of wood. I finished plugging numbers into the program and hit the Process button to see if what I input would return any renderings even moderately close to what this place looked like.
“What the fuck?” I laughed as the rendering came back and spun around. I clearly had done something wrong. The house looked as if it sat on top of some kind of bomb shelter bunker. The basement spaces were three times the size they were in reality.
“Yeah, I don’t think so,” I told myself as I closed the laptop. I pulled out the list I had made for work to do on the house and drew a big X through all of it. Underneath that I wrote, Call an architect in the morning.
As Manning would have said, home restoration was not speaking to my soul.
The next time I woke up in the middle of the night, I headed out back into the workshop. I had piles of wood. Some of it, if not all of it, was probably very old, and probably worth something. I didn’t know how to easily identify most of it. If there had been any identifying chalk marks or labels, I certainly couldn’t find them.
The last thing I wanted to do was throw a valuable piece of mahogany onto the lathe and ruin it. But I wanted to try something. I dug around until I located a four by four of what looked like pine. I hacked off a section about ten inches long and proceeded to fuck it up. There was no other description for the ruin I applied to that piece of wood.
I didn’t know what I was doing or what I wanted to accomplish. I was simply playing with tools that were beyond my skill set. But that didn’t stop me. I was going to figure this out.
In the morning, when the lack of sleep caught up to me, I shut everything down and trudged into the house. I was in the kitchen before I realized I was covered in flakes and splinters and dust from my exploration with the lathe.
I stripped down, leaving everything in a pile in the kitchen, and headed to the shower before bed. I had more sawdust and wood chips in my hair, and probably in my beard that I couldn’t see. I scratched at the fuzzy growth.
I passed out across the blankets with my towel barely hanging on my hips. I woke at some point in the late morning, or maybe it was early afternoon. My schedule was all off-kilter. I trudged back to the bathroom and got a good look at myself. I looked like shit. The fur on my face was patchy and not growing in like some kind of sexy lumberjack’s. It had to go. Too bad I couldn’t take care of the dark bags under my eyes with a little shaving cream and a razor.
Nope, that required some lifestyle changes. I wasn’t taking as good of care of myself as I should have been. I was eating crap, staying up too late, not sleeping enough. And instead of dealing with my issues, I was hyper-focusing on random projects.
If I wanted to try my hand at some real woodworking, I needed safety gear. I needed coveralls or a shop apron so I wasn’t dragging in remnants and scraps of my work. I needed a place to sit, or kick back and think, in the workshop. I got dressed and headed back to my office in the dining room and looked at the list.
Crossing off all the house projects felt right. Under Call an architect in the morning, I wrote down, Learn what the fuck you’re doing. For me, I found the best way to learn was to jump in and get my hands dirty.
I grabbed my keys and headed to the hardware store.
Finding what I needed wasn’t too difficult. With leather protective gloves, a few pairs of safety glasses in case I misplaced them, and a thick leather shop apron—I really liked the aesthetic of the apron, a combination of heavy canvas and leather panels with loops for tools along the hip—I headed toward the lumber area. I wanted to ask about a soft wood to practice on and get a yard or two of it.
“Yeah, I’m finally getting married.”
I froze when I heard the voice. I was about to turn the corner into the hardware aisle to cut across the store. That was Mac’s voice. Even though there was no reason for us to be at odds anymore, as Kenzie and I were no longer whatever it was we had been, I still saw no reason to antagonize the man.
I headed down the power tool aisle, just one over from where he stood talking.
“I almost never thought it would happen, but she convinced me.”
He sounded smug. Who the hell would want to convince Mac to marry them? I guess it was true, there’s someone out there for everyone. Did Kenzie know? She would be happy to finally have him off her back.
I didn’t hang around to hear what else he had to say. I didn’t care to involve myself in town gossip. And the tool aisle cut through the store just as easily as the other one. I left the store with my supplies, a few lengths of more pine four by four, and more sandpaper than I thought I would ever use.
With Mac out of the way, I really should try at apologizing to Kenzie. It’s not like I had to track her down and find her. I knew where she lived. And afternoons were too quiet without Ruby around. I missed them, missed the way Kenzie would look at me, the way she would kiss me. I missed Ruby and her smart, sarcastic mouth.
What made my soul happy? Having those two in my life.
I couldn’t just show up on their doorstep and expect to be welcomed back. I needed to show them how sorry I was. Ruby was easy. I owed her a phone. I wasn’t even going to mess around with making her pay for minutes. I would simply add her to my plan. I should have done that from the beginning.
Kenzie needed something special. There was that almost finished piece back in the workshop. It really only needed feet and then a good sanding and polishing. I could turn a set of feet. It wasn’t going to be that hard to figure this lathe thing out.
I actually felt good on the drive back home. I hadn’t realized that feeling had been missing until it returned.
