13. Aster
— ? —
Aster
I have no fucking idea what I’m doing.
That’s the conclusion I’ve reached after three days of trying to build a garden shed out of a pile of lumber and a paperback framing manual off Amora’s shelf that assumes I already know what words like joist and rafter mean.
My hands are covered in blisters that have blistered again.
I’ve hit my thumb with the hammer so many times it’s turning an impressive shade of purple.
And the structure I’ve managed to put together so far looks less like a shed and more like something that should be condemned.
But I keep going, because there isn’t anything else here to do.
The cabin has no television and the service out here comes and goes, so there is nothing to do from the moment I wake up until the moment I fall over except this.
In LA there was always something. A call, a session, a car waiting, somebody’s birthday, an assistant with a schedule.
I understood myself as a busy person. It turns out I was a person who was never alone with anything for longer than about forty minutes, which are two very different things, and I have had three full days to sit with that.
This afternoon the sun is brutal, beating down on my back while I try to get the framing right.
I’ve already torn apart and rebuilt the same section twice because the corners weren’t square.
Amora showed me how to check that with a carpenter’s square, and I’ve been obsessively measuring ever since, paranoid that I’ll screw it up a third time and have to explain why.
There’s a rhythm to it that I wasn’t expecting.
Measure, mark, cut, check, swear, cut again.
My whole life I’ve made things that don’t exist until somebody hears them, songs that live in the air for three minutes and then stop, and this is the opposite of that.
This is a thing you can put your hand on.
Every board I get right stays right, sitting there in the grass being evidence, and every board I get wrong sits there too.
Nobody is going to clap for this shed. That’s the part I keep circling.
There is no version of this where twenty thousand people make a noise about it, no version where it charts, no version where somebody puts a microphone in my face and asks me what the process was like.
It will exist in a yard in Vermont and hold a lawnmower, and the only two people who will ever have an opinion about it live in that house, and one of them isn’t speaking to me.
I have been chasing the other thing for six years.
I have been so far inside the other thing that I built an entire personality out of it.
And it took losing my wife and flying across the country and getting handed a hammer by a woman who doesn’t like me for it to occur to me that I’ve never once in my adult life made something that wasn’t for an audience.
Flora watches from a distance. I’ve caught glimpses of her over the past three days, at the kitchen window while she does dishes, on the porch while she drinks her morning coffee, in the garden while she helps her mother with the vegetables.
She never comes close enough to talk, but she’s always watching, and every time I look up too fast her head turns away a half-second too late for me to believe it was an accident.
She’s wearing her hair up out here, which she never does in LA.
No makeup. Her mother’s boots, which are a size too big for her, so she walks differently, and I’ve been watching my own wife walk differently for three days like a man studying a stranger.
She looks better than she has in a year.
That’s the thing I can’t put down. Eight days without me and the color is back in her face, and I keep coming back to the arithmetic of that and not liking the answer.
Twice she’s brought lemonade out with her mother and stayed on the porch to drink hers instead of taking it inside. She didn’t look at me either time, but she stayed, and the second time she stayed longer.
I don’t know if that’s a good sign or a bad one. I’ve decided to believe it’s good, because I have to believe something.
Amora appears with lemonade around noon and surveys my progress with an expression I can’t read at all. She does this three or four times a day and I’ve started listening for the screen door, which is a thing I’d be embarrassed about if there were anybody here to be embarrassed in front of.
“You’re holding that saw like a microphone,” she tells me.
“Old habits.” I adjust my grip.
“See that you break them. That wood was expensive.”
She doesn’t coddle me. She doesn’t offer encouragement or praise or any of the things I’ve gotten used to from people who want something from me.
She points out my mistakes and expects me to fix them, and that’s the whole relationship.
Yesterday I installed a board backwards and she watched me do it, watched me step back and admire my work with my hands on my hips like an idiot, and then waited until I noticed the problem myself.
“You knew I was going to screw that up,” I said.
“I did.”
“Why didn’t you stop me?”
“Because you’ll remember it better this way.”
She was right. I haven’t made that particular mistake since, and I’ve started catching a few of them before they happen, which is either progress or beginner’s luck.
There’s no praise in it and no cruelty either. She talks to me the way you’d talk to a slow apprentice you’ve decided to keep, and after six years of being handled by professionals whose income depends on my mood, being talked to like that is close to a religious experience.
She takes the empty lemonade glass and heads back toward the house, and then stops halfway and turns around.
“You’re not doing this for the shed,” she says. It isn’t a question.
“No.”
“Good. I’d have concerns about a man who flew across the country for a shed.” She looks at the framing for a second. “It’s better than it was yesterday. That’s all anything needs to be.”
Then she goes inside and I stand there in the sun feeling absurdly, disproportionately encouraged by a woman who has not once said anything nice to me since I arrived.
I get the north corner squared a little after two, and it holds, and it’s the first thing I’ve built in my life that hasn’t had to be taken apart again.
I stand there looking at it for a while like a moron.
Three boards and a right angle. I’ve had platinum records that moved me less, and I’m aware of how that sounds, and I don’t care.
The afternoon wears on and I make what passes for decent progress when you’ve never held a hammer before last week.
I’m trying to secure a crossbeam to the frame, driving a nail that keeps going in crooked because nothing I do ever goes the way it’s supposed to, and eventually I give up and try to pull the nail back out.
My hand slips on the hammer and the claw comes back and catches the meat of my palm on the backswing, and I hear it before I feel it.
The pain is immediate and brutal. Blood wells up bright red against my skin and for a second I just stand there staring at it, too surprised to react.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake.” Flora’s voice cuts through the haze, sharp with exasperation. “You’re bleeding everywhere.”
She’s marching across the yard with a first-aid kit in her hand and her face set in that expression that means she’s annoyed and trying not to show she’s worried. I’ve seen it a thousand times over three years of marriage. I never thought I’d be grateful to see it again.
“I’m fine,” I say automatically.
“You’re dripping blood all over my mother’s lawn.” She grabs my wrist and yanks my hand toward her, examining the wound. “Sit down before you pass out.”
“I’m not going to pass out.”
“You’re pale as a ghost and swaying. Sit.”
I sit on the porch steps, mostly because she’s right and partly because I don’t want to argue with her when she’s actually talking to me.
It’s the closest she’s been to me in eight days.
I can smell her shampoo over the sawdust and the blood and it takes everything I have not to say something stupid about it.
She drops down beside me and snaps open the kit.
“This is deep,” she says, prodding at the cut with careful fingers. “You probably need stitches.”
“I probably need a lot of things.”
She doesn’t respond to that. Her hands are gentle in spite of her sharp tone, cleaning the wound with antiseptic that stings like hell and then wrapping it in gauze with quick, efficient movements.
“You’ve done this before,” I say.
“Animal shelters. You learn basic first aid when you’re handling scared strays who don’t know you’re trying to help them.”
“So I’m a scared stray now?”
“If the collar fits.” She finishes the wrapping but she doesn’t let go of my hand. Her fingers rest against my pulse point, warm and familiar. “You were holding the hammer wrong.”
“I was holding it the way the book said.”
“The book didn’t know you.” She turns my hand over and checks the wrap. “You hold everything like it’s a microphone. Saw, hammer, coffee cup. My mother’s been saying it for two days and I’ve been pretending not to laugh.”
“You’ve been laughing at me.”
“At the window. Quietly.” She meets my eyes for the first time in three days, and there’s a corner of her mouth doing a thing it hasn’t done since the restaurant. “You built the same wall twice yesterday.”
“The first one was practice.”
“The first one fell over.”
“Which is how you know it was practice.”
She laughs. It gets out before she can stop it, one short surprised sound, and she looks annoyed with herself and doesn’t take it back.
Her gaze drops to my hand, to my ring finger, where my wedding band sits scratched and filthy from three days of manual labor.
I catch her looking. “I never take it off,” I say quietly. “Haven’t since you put it on me. Not once. You can stop checking.”
Her hand twitches toward her own ring finger, and I see it, her wedding band still there, still circling her finger in spite of everything.
“I should let you get back to whatever you’re doing,” she says, standing up abruptly.
“Building a shed.”
“Is that what you’re calling it?” She glances at my crooked frame and my badly placed boards. “Mom’s got a level in the barn. It’s the thing that isn’t a microphone.”
“I’ll find it.”
“Try not to bleed on it.” She brushes off her knees. “And keep the bandage dry. I’m not doing this twice in one day.”
“You’d do it twice.”
She doesn’t answer that, but she doesn’t say no.
She walks back to the house and I watch her until the screen door closes behind her.
She came to help me. She didn’t have to do that.
She could have let me bleed all over the yard and figure it out on my own, could have watched the whole thing from the window and done absolutely nothing about it, and there is a version of my wife that exists right now who would have done exactly that and been justified.
But she saw me hurting and she came, and she was out of the house so fast that she must have already been at the window when it happened.
I pick up the hammer with my good hand and get back to work, and I keep going until the light is gone and I physically cannot see the nails anymore.