It was the one thing he could always do, the thing that always made sense. He could build; he could fix. He could understand how a broken thing worked and make it work again. In school, he’d struggled. Words swam on the board, a muddle. He needed glasses, but no one figured it out until fourth grade, so he had trouble learning to read. Math? The only things less understandable than letters were numbers. But in the shop with his father, with the hum of the saw, and the sound of the hammer, and sandpaper on wood, the smell of varnish and sawdust—that’s where it all worked, where the pieces fit together. There was never any question, no abstraction. In the shop, if you had the right tools, you could fix anything. Not so in the world outside.
He wiped down the surface of the work area. His dad was long gone, but Joshua Beckham still followed the rules of the shop. A place for everything and everything in its place. Keep the work area uncluttered. Clean up at night before you go home.
He’d fixed Mr. Smyth’s vacuum. He wasn’t going to charge the old man because it was just that the roller was full of hair; that’s why it had stopped moving. It had only taken him a few minutes to clean it and there was nothing to it. His dad wouldn’t have charged for a thing like that, and neither would Josh. Mr. Smyth, he knew, didn’t have much money—otherwise he’d have just replaced the old vacuum like anyone else would have.
After that, Josh had just finished sanding down and refinishing an old table for Jennifer Warbler; she’d found it at a garage sale and asked if he could “work some magic.” He could.
The table came to him gouged and wobbly, scratches and dull places on the surface, a chip out of the leg. He loved stripping a thing down, sanding away the old, patching up the wounds, watching it come back to life with a brand-new coat of stain.
He wasn’t sure what he’d charge Jennifer. She had three boys who ran her ragged, and she was a good customer, had Joshua out at her place six or seven times a year at least, most recently to fix a hole the oldest boy Brendan put in the drywall—with his brother’s head. (Jennifer: Thank goodness he was wearing his skateboarding helmet!) The loose dowel in the banister, a closet door off its hinges, clogged plumbing, some electrical (though he mainly needed to call in Todd for that—you didn’t mess with wires if you didn’t know what you were doing). Jennifer was married to Wayne Warbler, who commuted into the city to work. You know Wayne is a smart man, but he is not handy. I love my hubby, but I’m not sure he would even know what to do if I handed him a hammer.
Josh wanted to take the table over to the Warblers after he’d finished work, but the varnish wasn’t dry. It was better to do it anyway during the day when Wayne and the boys weren’t there. Jennifer was different when she was alone, when her husband was at work and the boys were at school. She was more exuberant, less distracted. Joshua wanted her to enjoy the table, to see how beautiful he’d made it, not be pulled in a million different directions. Fabulous, Josh! What do I owe you? Like it was just another thing she had to cross off her list. He knew if she had a minute, that she’d see and appreciate how an old thing, one she’d found and recognized as beautiful, had been made new again. She was a person who recognized good work and beauty. Few others did.
He pulled the door to the workshop shut behind him and locked it. He had a lot of expensive power tools inside, and there had been a rash of thefts and burglaries in the area. The property he shared with his elderly mother was isolated, a total of ten acres now though it had been bigger once. He’d sold off a parcel of twenty acres after his father passed to pay off the old man’s debts and help to take care of his mother. But the house was still far from the road and surrounded by trees; it was just him and his mom now. Nurses came in during the day and some evenings to help with her meals, bath, and medicine. Her best friend from childhood helped out sometimes, too.
The night was cool as he moved up the path between the shop and the house, a path his father had walked every day just before supper. Josh hadn’t imagined that it would have been his path as well. When he was young, he’d dreamed of being all kinds of things—a firefighter, a cop, an acrobat, an astronaut, an ice cream man. No little boy dreams of being a handyman, the guy you call to clean out your gutters because your very successful hedge fund manager husband just doesn’t have the time for that kind of work. But, all things considered, it wasn’t that bad. When his father had passed, and his clients just started calling Josh instead, he fell into it easily. It was right, familiar. And he didn’t have anything else going on after a string of failures: he didn’t past the psych evaluation on the police exam (which he still didn’t understand). He’d abandoned the real estate course he was taking online. The lead singer for the band in which he played bass guitar got a DUI and was in rehab. They hadn’t been getting many gigs anyway—mainly because they weren’t that good.
As he approached the house, Josh saw that Mom’s light was still on upstairs but that the nurse’s car was gone. The nurse had probably left around nine, and his mother was most likely propped up in bed, watching reruns of Criminal Minds, her favorite show, when she really should be sleeping.
Inside, he went to the kitchen (it was exactly the same as it had always been except that some of the appliances had been upgraded ten years ago and needed upgrading again), grabbed a beer from the fridge, and headed upstairs.
“Ma,” he said, pushing the door open a little. “You should be asleep.”
She was, as predicted, propped up in bed, her white hair a little wild, her flannel nightgown too big.
“Hmm,” she said, squinting at the screen. “That’s what I used to say to you. Did you listen?”
He sat in the chair by her bed, took a swig of his beer. On the dresser by the television were his parents’ framed wedding picture and another one of his ma holding him in front of the hospital, a yellow tinge to both photos, she looking impossibly young and pretty like a girl he wouldn’t mind meeting. Even now she still had that sparkle in her hazel eyes—mischief.
“Guess not,” he said, kicking off his boots and propping his feet up next to her on the bed.
“Always with that Game Boy under the sheets,” she said. “Your brother with his books.”
“Yeah,” he said, smiling.
“No one who is told to go to bed ever wants to, young or old,” she said. “The end of another day.”