Niko
Chapter eight
The drawer had been done since Tuesday. I’d fitted it that afternoon, waxed the runners in the evening, and slid it home so it seated with a sound like a held breath let go. The drawer tells you when it’s right.
It was late Thursday afternoon, and I was working on my latest job, a set of shelves for a client in Ravenswood. The boards were milled and ready.
The workbench was clean. I’d done a full wipe down in the morning and re-oiled the surface. While I was at it, I’d swept the floor and put away three clamps that had been leaning against the wall since before Christmas.
At twenty minutes to five, I gave up on the shelves. I told myself it was because it needed fresh eyes. I’d have to wait until tomorrow morning for that.
Rafe suggested Thursday, and I’d said Thursday’s good. Neither of us picked a time, and I’d spent the day trying not to guess about when he might arrive.
Five minutes later, headlights swung across the storefront glass. It was a truck, and it parked at the curb. I heard the solid thunk of a door shutting.
It was likely Rafe. I moved toward the drawer, but I stopped. I wanted him to see it in the furniture instead of out of context on the bench.
There was a knock on the door, two polite knuckles. I walked across the room and opened it. Rafe entered with the January cold following him inside. He held a paper bakery bag. There was a pale scatter of cat hair across one shoulder of his dark jacket, and a longer drift down the left sleeve.
“These are for you.” He held out the bag. “The bakery had two cherry ones left. The guy behind me in line was upset when I took them.”
“He’ll live.”
“He said he comes every Thursday for them.”
“Then he should come earlier.” I took the bag and set it on the end of the bench. “Thanks.”
He caught me looking at the sleeve. He looked down at it himself and brushed at it twice with his free hand.
“I had a thing this afternoon,” he said.
“A cat thing?”
“Yes.”
He continued.
“Trier—one of my teammates—his cat had a vet appointment, and it conflicted with his PT slot, so I took her.” He reported it all in a flat tone. “Her name’s Peaches. She’s fourteen.”
“You took a cat to the vet.”
“It was on my way. The appointment was fine. She’s got a thyroid thing, but it’s managed. The vet said her numbers were good for her age, and then the tech said it too, separately, so I don’t think they were just being nice.”
“And then you took her home, or Trier picked her up?”
“I took her home. I’d been warned there was a thing, and I still wasn’t ready for that,” he said.
“What happened? What can a fourteen-year-old cat do?”
“She’d had a day,” he said, as if that were an explanation.
He paused and took a breath.
“She goes under the bed after she gets home,” he said.
“Trier said if nobody’s there she stays under it all night and doesn’t eat, and then she’s insulted for a week.
So, he wanted me to sit on the couch and not make it a thing.
An hour and a half later, she came out, sat on the opposite end of the couch while cleaning herself, and then she went to the kitchen to eat. ” He shrugged.
“You waited for an hour and a half?”
“I answered some texts.”
I pointed at his sleeve. “You picked her up?”
“She leaned,” he said. “Once she decides you’re furniture, she really commits.”
“And Trier knows you stayed?” I asked.
“He texted when he got home. She was eating.”
I let a beat pass. “Come and look at the drawer,” I said.
We walked over to a walnut chest of drawers. It belonged to a client in Andersonville.
“You remember the corner you held,” I said.
“The dovetail. The test one.”
“That was the practice run for this.” I pulled out the drawer.
It came out silently. Rafe crouched slightly to put his eyes level with it, hands behind his back.
“Do it again,” he said.
I pushed the drawer in and pulled it out again.
“It doesn’t make any sound.”
“It doesn’t because it can’t. There’s a sixty-fourth of an inch clearance on a side. It’s less when the humidity makes the wood expand in July.”
I tipped the drawer up so Rafe could see the runner. “And this is waxed, not greased. Grease holds dust, and dust acts like sandpaper. Wax burnishes in. My grandfather waxed runners with a candle stub, and I have never found a better tool for it. I’ve looked because it annoys me.”
“Why does it annoy you?”
“Because I own planes that cost hundreds of dollars, and the correct tool for this job is a buck at Target.” One corner of Rafe’s mouth rose at that.
“Here.” I slid the drawer free of the chest and held it out to him. “Hold it for a minute. You held it when it was only a corner.”
He took it in both hands. He turned it and found the dovetails at the corners. I watched him find the one he’d held on his previous visit.
“It’s part of the furniture now,” he said.
“The proper place for it.”
He handed the drawer back with both hands, and I slid it back home.
Rafe turned toward the bench, where the day’s tools were still out from the shelf work. He pointed at a plane. “Can I ask what that one does? It’s the one you were using when Max brought me by the first time. It sounded like—like skating. Separate long strokes, like skates.”
I looked at him for a moment. Then I took a scrap of straight-grained cherry off the rack and set it in the vise.
“Take your jacket off,” I said. “Relax, and I’ll show you how to plane.”
He shrugged out of the jacket, folded it in half, and set it on a stool. I handed him an apron, and he put it on.
“Stand here.” I positioned him at the end of the bench, square to the cherry in the vise. “Plant your feet like you’re ready for a faceoff. Wider.”
“You know about faceoffs?”
“I watched the clip, and I know you don’t stand narrow.
” I handed him the plane. He took it in both hands, holding it the wrong way.
“It’s not a trophy. It’s a tool. Front hand on the knob, back hand on the tote, like this.
” I moved his back hand down and turned his front hand a quarter so the palm rode the knob instead of gripping it. His hands were warm.
“I’m actually going to do this?”
“You are, and remember, the plane already wants to cut, and you don’t need to force it. You’re steering it and keeping it honest.”
“Steering it and keeping it honest,” he repeated.
“Weight on your front hand at the beginning of the stroke, and then you transfer it to the back hand through the middle, until it’s completely there at the finish. If you press the front all the way, you dig at the far end. If you press the back the whole way, it skips at the start.”
Rafe frowned at the board. “Like a stride.”
“You’d know that. Go ahead.”
His first stroke stalled a foot in with a chirp like a startled bird. The second one chattered, three little skips, and lifted off the wood entirely at the end, planing four inches of air.
“That last part of the stroke,” I said, “where the plane left the board, you planed the air. That’s a very advanced skill.”
“The air is smoother now.”
I reset the board in the vise a half-turn. “You stopped moving your weight. You got to the middle and thought about it, and the second you thought about it, your hands quit and your arms took over. Arms are stupid. Weight is smart. Try it again.”
His third stroke was better. On the fourth, the chatter moved down the board and got quieter, a stutter instead of a skip.
“You’re strangling the tote a bit,” I said.
“It’s heavier than it looks.”
“Loosen the last two fingers. The plane doesn’t need you to be strong; it just needs to know you’re there.” He almost smiled again. “You’re a professional athlete. If your coach told you that you were leaning in too much with your strength, you’d know what he meant.”
“Coach Markel says if you’re muscling it, you’re late.”
“Coach Markel could run a wood shop. Do it again.”
The fifth stroke went the full length. It wasn’t clean. There was a whisper of chatter at the very end, but the shaving came up in one piece and broke at the last second into two. He stopped and looked at the pieces.
“Almost,” he said. Rafe reset his feet before I said anything else, slightly wider.
“Don’t aim for the end of the board,” I said. “The stroke doesn’t end at the end. Plane through it. Six inches past the wood, like the board’s longer than it is.”
“Follow through.”
On the sixth stroke, he rolled through the middle without a hitch, carried out past the end, and the plane sang the whole way.
It was the skate sound he’d heard when I used it.
The shaving curled over his hand and kept coming, one unbroken ribbon the full length of the cherry, thin enough to read through.
Rafe straightened up with the shaving draped over his hand. He held it up to a light held at the end of the bench in a vise, and turned it, and the light shone through it pink.
“Feel the board,” I said.
He laid his palm flat on the cherry and drew it along. For the first time, I heard him laugh.
“That was you,” I said. “Not the plane. The plane did the cutting. You did the getting out of its way.”
“Can I—would it be all right if I did it again?”
I smiled. “The board’s a scrap, and you’re entertaining me. Go.”
He did stroke after stroke, resetting his feet each time, collecting the shavings on the bench in a pale pile. He checked each one against the light.
Somewhere around the twentieth stroke, Rafe’s stomach rumbled like the sound of a truck downshifting on a grade.
He looked down at himself. “Sorry. That was—“
“Loud,” I said. “That was loud.”
“I had lunch, but it was—huh—it was at eleven.”
It was now a quarter past seven.
I walked toward the stairs to the second floor. “Leave the apron on the peg,” I said. “Bring the shavings if you’re attached to them.”
***
Rafe stopped two steps inside my apartment. He looked at the bookshelf I built at twenty-three, the coffee table I built at twenty-six, and the bench by the door. Then he pointed to a chair by the window.
“That one leans,” he said.
“Yes.”
“On purpose?”
“It was incompetence. I built it eight years ago. The back legs are out of square, and I didn’t catch it until the glue was dry.” I pulled a skillet down from the hook over the island and set it on the stove. “I keep the chair there as a reminder.”
I poured enough olive oil into the skillet to cover the bottom, then pulled Monday’s bread off the counter and cut four slices thick as my thumb.
“You don’t have to feed me,” Rafe said.
“I know.”
“I can get something on the way—“
I set an empty plate down in front of him, and he stopped talking. Ma taught me. You don’t ask a person if they’re hungry because asking gives them room to be polite and reject it.
I heated the soup I’d made on Tuesday. It was simple: lentils, cumin, and a bay leaf I forgot to fish out. The bread sizzled when I set it in the skillet. After it turned golden on the bottom, I flipped it over and laid hard cheese over the top to soften.
“That smells like my grandma’s house,” he said.
“It’s the bay leaf.”
“No, it’s the other part.”
“Cumin.”
He shook his head. “I don’t think she uses that. Maybe it doesn’t smell like her house at all.”
“Warm food cooked from scratch. The specifics don’t matter.” I ladled the soup and set the bowl next to the bread. He ate with both hands involved. Rafe had eaten a third of the bowl before he came up for air.
“What’s in this?”
“Lentils, onion, carrots, and garlic. Cumin, bay leaf, and lemon are the seasoning.”
“My mom makes something close. She uses barley.” He tore a corner off the bread. “We have it all winter long, but it’s never exactly the same soup twice.”
“What does she put in it?”
“Whatever she has.” He shrugged. He pointed to the stove. “The skillet. It’s cast-iron, right? It looks old.”
“It was my grandmother’s,” I said. “It came over from Greece with her.”
“Does it work better than a new one?”
“It works older than a new one.” I paused. “Fifty years of cooking polishes the iron. She fed people out of it for decades, so when I feed people out of it, that keeps going. It’s the same reason I kept the chair. I like things that have a history.”
He carried his bowl to the sink, and then he took the skillet off the stove. Before I could say anything, he’d already gotten the salt out of the cupboard.
“Where’s your rag?”
“To the left of the sink.”
He ran the water hot and kept it away from the pan. He wet the rag and worked the salt around the bottom in the same steady circles he’d been putting into that cherry board an hour ago. Then he set the skillet on the burner and lit it, watching while the skillet steamed itself dry.
“You learned from your mother,” I said.
“She’d have taken my hand off if I ran water in it.” He watched the pan. “We had one that came from my dad’s side. She used to say if she caught soap in it, we’d all be eating out of a Dutch oven till our funerals.”
“So, you already knew the value of age in cast-iron.”
“I did, but I wanted to hear you tell it.”
Rafe waited until the steaming stopped and killed the flame. “Thanks for the dinner. I need to go.” He headed for the door and slipped on his jacket.
“You’re welcome,” I said.
“And thanks for the plane. I’m going to think about that for a week.”
I opened the door.
“Thursday was good,” he said. Then he headed down the stairs.
The truck started. The lights swung across the glass as Rafe pulled onto the street.
My phone buzzed in my pocket.
Max: news from the ministry of Ma
Max: Sunday dinner. Ma’s doing the whole thing. Lamb, the good pans down off the top shelf, the tablecloth that only comes out for people she’s trying to impress.
Max: You know why, too. Rafe is coming. Ma called him. HERSELF. she got his number from me under false pretenses that I only understood in hindsight, like all great cons
Max: transparency is the foundation of brotherhood so I’m telling you now: there will be questions at that table and I will be deflecting NONE of them. I’ve been deflecting all week. I’m tired. you’re on your own
I crossed over to the living room couch and sat down.
Niko: I’ll bring the pad for the chair. Tell Ma to stop calling my clients.
Max: he’s not your client
I thought about that and didn’t have an answer for it.
Niko: Good night, Max