Chapter 33
— Chapter 33 —
I wake up early. Aubrey is just out the door. It’s still dark, but my brain is bright, and it seems silly to stay under the covers on the couch, letting morning disappear. Coriolanus is snoring next to me and nips my arm when I sit up, like payback for taking my warm body away.
Aubrey left a cup of coffee on the counter for me. She makes pour-over with these cheap plastic cones she brought home from Gristedes. Usually, the cup she leaves is cold by the time I’m ready to drink it, but today it’s still hot.
I used to like to wake up super early for school when I was a kid. I’d make myself breakfast and watch I Love Lucy reruns on the little TV in the kitchen, my chair pulled up close so I could hear the show without the risk of waking anyone. I wish that little kitchen TV was still around. Instead, I bring my coffee into the living room and stare at the stars I hung on the wall. They change everything. They make that wall mine and Aubrey’s and Shray’s too. There’s an urge growing like a crack in my mind that knows exactly how it wants to be patched, and nobody is here to tell me no. I haul Vili’s toolbox up to my parents’ bedroom and lay the chisels out on the smaller dresser so I can see the cut and curve of each one.
I have to move my mother’s watch to wipe the dust from the surface, and my hands shake as if it could be a trip line. But, of course, it isn’t. Nothing happens. I drape her watch on my arm for a moment before I slip it into one of the small drawers at the side of the mirror. Her wrists were small like mine, and she had scattered freckles on the backs of her hands.
My mother bought that watch for herself when she got her first job as a bond analyst trainee the summer she graduated. She told me once she was the first person in her family to go to college and the first to get a white-collar job. I didn’t think it was a big deal. Plenty of people I knew had gone to college—all of my teachers. Step was the first in his family for both of those things and had a master’s degree, even though my mother thought he wasn’t smart.
Years after I left, I was reading an Angela Carter novel I’d bought at a used bookstore. Tucked between the pages, I found a faded leaflet about a rally for the Equal Credit Opportunity Act and realized that my mother had gotten a job on Wall Street before she was even allowed to have a credit card in her own name. Everything she attempted was exponentially more difficult than anything Step achieved. And even though it’s not the way anyone would want their mother to feel about their father, I understood why being the woman behind that man must have felt like a constant insult. She was the one who talked Charlie into referring all his new homeowners to Arnalds Insurance. Step had been struggling to keep the business open, and then suddenly he had a stream of new clients who wanted comprehensive coverage on their luxury properties. To Step’s face, my mother acted surprised, like it had all been Charlie’s idea, but I’d heard her on the phone with Charlie one afternoon when I skipped going to Steena’s after school so I could study for a science test.
“Of course, we can find ways to overlook… Right… Right,” she said as she paced in the kitchen, tethered to the wall by the phone cord. “It’s a good partnership, Charlie. It makes sense. Who’s going to take care of you better than family?”
When she hung up the phone and realized I was home, she stormed into the living room and said, “God, you’re such a lurker,” giving me a look that made me certain I shouldn’t repeat anything I’d heard.
Charlie invited Step to go golfing that weekend as part of a foursome, with a mortgage broker and a building inspector that were buddies of his. They smoked cigars and let Step drive the golf cart. And even though he had previously subscribed to the “good walk wasted” opinion of golf, Step came home buzzed, sunburned, and thoroughly charmed.
“Charlie said I played brilliantly for a first timer,” Step told us, pride showing in the awkward smirk that always took over his face when he tried not to look too pleased.
I understood how Step felt. Charlie’s special skill was making everyone in his presence believe they belonged there. And like me, Step had probably never felt that way before. So he agreed to handle Charlie’s homeowners as white-glove clients, processing their claims personally. And when Arnalds Insurance earnings tripled that year, he truly believed he’d proved himself to Charlie and turned his business around all on his own.
I choose the biggest scoop-shaped gouge and push the sharp edge into the smooth dark surface of my mother’s dresser, watching the wood curl away. Underneath the stain, the pine is soft and light.
I make waves, carving a spirited sea to churn up the flat surface, imagining that I am liberating the wood, like how Michelangelo said his sculptures already existed in the marble and he was simply freeing them. Maybe my mother’s dresser wants to be the ocean, and helping it become the truest version of itself will turn it into something I can love.
I picture sun breaking through clouds on the top edge of the mirrored hutch, a Viking ship to one side, fish and sea monsters and sirens swimming along the drawers below.
I will need help taking the mirror down to carve the sun. I’ll have to empty the drawers of my mother’s things and lay the whole dresser on its back to carve the front. But I have a picture in my mind and no need to hurry. My brain feels whole for having started. I rough in waves, carving happily, until I have to get ready for work.