2. Max
MAX
When the music in my workshop stops playing, I don’t even look up from the piece of wood I’m holding. Firstly, because if I move now, I’m going to mess up the portion I’m carving. And secondly, because I don’t want to give Warren the satisfaction.
“I told you to call first,” I grumble, saying the words to the chair leg in my hand, rather than the man who is surely standing in the threshold of my workshop, trying to figure out how to get me to do something I don’t want to do.
Warren is always trying to get me to do something I don’t want to do.
“Your phone is never on,” Warren counters, which is fair. Since moving up here, I haven’t had much use for it, and it gets a shitty signal anyway. Most days, I forget I even have one, until Warren drives out and chews me out for being unsafe.
Finally, I finish the section I’m working on and look up, giving Warren a droll expression and rubbing my hands down my thighs, so the rough material of my jeans scrapes against my palms.
Warren is just a few years younger than me, but I know it doesn’t look that way. My beard is scruffy, overgrown. The year I spent building my cabin gave my appearance a hard edge that would take more than a shower to wash away.
The man standing in the doorway to my shop, on the other hand, looks his age — just under thirty, wearing a red plaid shirt and a puffer vest that screams I drink soy lattes. He probably posted a picture of his coffee on social media this morning, before getting in his EV and driving up to see me.
With a mop of well-groomed, golden curls and a clean-shaven face, Warren looks like the type of man who could sell a hand-crafted chair for over a thousand dollars to a set of tourists just driving through for the season.
And in my old jeans and stained work shirt, I look like the kind of man who makes the chair.
Over Warren’s shoulder, I can see that the sun is high in the sky.
I realize I’m sweating, though the workshop is under a few trees and gets a decent breeze through the windows.
I still haven’t gotten around to installing any better cooling devices.
In the winter, it’s not so bad; I pile some firewood into the stove in the corner.
But during the summer? It can get hot, like it is right now. And I didn’t even notice. When I’m out here working, time seems to fly by. I forget about things like the temperature and drinking water.
As I come back into my body, the haze of focus on the craft wearing off, I realize I’m starving and have to pee.
“What do you want?” I say, realizing Warren is still looking at me, waiting for a response. I’m not going to give him the satisfaction of admitting I have no idea where my phone even is at the moment. “I don’t have any finished pieces for you. Told you I wouldn’t until the end of the month.”
“Sign-up window is getting smaller,” Warren says, following me through the back door of the workshop and up the porch of my cabin, directly inside. “We have to get you and your idea registered!”
I don’t know when he decided we were close enough for him to invade my personal space like this, but all the frowning and grumbling at him hasn’t changed his mind about it. Now, he stands and pets my cat in the living room, while I duck into the small bathroom and go.
Normally, I’d do this out in the woods. But as close as Warren seems to think we are, I don’t really feel like peeing in front of him.
When I first bought my little parcel of land and moved out here, I made frequent visits to the general store. Before I got in the rhythm of hunting and fishing for my own stuff, I was living on canned tuna and bags of overpriced beef jerky.
After seeing me at his store a couple of times, Warren had, apparently, decided that he and I were going to be friends.
He got me hooked up with a plumber and electrician who could come out and clear my cabin — apparently, even in the mountains, I have to have everything up to code — and after he saw a table I was working on, he decided he would sell my stuff for me.
I wash my hands and grab some beef jerky, which I still buy from his shop, when I can’t make venison jerky myself, then lean against the wall. I watch Warren, who has made himself at home in one of my chairs, rub his hand up and down my cat’s belly as she rolls to her back on his lap.
“Who’s a good girl?” he asks her, which makes me roll my eyes.
I’d never planned on adopting a cat. After I finished building my cabin, in the part of October when the freezing rain threatens to turn to snow, she showed up on my porch and meowed so pitifully that I had no choice but to bring her inside.
Warren teased me about it for a while, said he thought I’d be the type to get a bulldog or German Shepard, not a tortoiseshell cat with a love for dried fish and waking me up by stretching out over my chest and purring loudly.
If he knew that I sometimes call her sweetheart when we’re alone, the teasing would start all over again.
“The sign-up window can close,” I say, finishing the beef jerky and brushing my hands together before moving to the sink for a glass of water.
My cabin is just one room, other than the bathroom.
No doors separate the living area from the bedroom, though the bed is tucked away on the other side.
It makes having conversations from one ‘room’ to another very easy. “I already told you. I’m not doing it.”
Warren throws his hands up, and Donatello lets out an angry mewl at the sudden halt in pets. “I just don’t get why. Your stuff is good.”
“I know.”
“And winning a competition like this could get your name out more places.”
“I know.”
“Which would make you money,” Warren stresses, as though earning money might be the thing that finally sways me. I laugh, set down my water cup, and look meaningfully around at the little one-room cabin I’ve built for myself.
If I cared about that shit — making loads of cash and buying a McMansion — I would never have moved out here.
Never would have slept in my Jeep for months while trying to figure out how to build the cabin, then shivered my ass off in the cabin while I tried to figure out how to install the wood stove.
At first, I was working off savings, then when Warren sold a few of my pieces, I switched to making money that way.
The past twelve years of living up here have just been improving upon the original design — a place in the mountains away from everyone.
Somewhere to sleep, somewhere to shower, somewhere to use the bathroom.
Now that I have all that — and my workshop, which looks much better than the cabin, aesthetically, considering the amount of expertise I gained through the cabin-building adventure — I don’t need anything else.
A cut of the money from the stuff I sell goes to Warren, some of it goes to the local school as a donation, and the rest goes straight into my saving’s account, which has already ridiculously ballooned far beyond what I could ever need.
“Okay, forget the money thing,” Warren says, rolling his eyes and petting Dona again, who settles down. “What about the fact that your stuff is amazing, and it would be selfish of you to keep those skills to yourself?”
“There’s nothing you can say to change my mind on this,” I say, letting out a long sigh.
I know what it’s like to put yourself out there. To put your heart and soul into making something you think is beautiful, only to have it smashed and destroyed. And there’s no way in hell I’m going through something like that again.
That’s why I use wood now. It’s a lot harder to break.
Besides, furniture is practical. Usable.
Something you can throw in your place and forget that someone made it at all.
I never meant to get so technical with the builds, never meant to start with the carving.
But sometimes, it’s like parts of me are just leaking out, leaving fingerprints all over a piece when I’m done, no matter how withheld I try to stay.
“It would mean a lot to me,” Warren tries, and I laugh again, shaking my head.
“I bet it would.” I walk over to the door, already feeling the pull back to the workshop. It might be hot, late July, but in the next hour or so, it will start to cool down again. That’s the nice thing about being in the mountains — heat never seems to stick around for long.
That’s a problem in the winter, but not so much now. Besides, the hard winters are behind me now that I know what to do — how to prepare, and how to use a wood stove without nearly burning my whole cabin to the ground.
“Can I at least see what you’re working on?” Warren asks, because he knows I’ll say yes.
Even after all this time, and all these lessons learned, I still can’t resist the urge to show someone else what I’ve made. Maybe some residual desire to get a gold star from my parents, that good job, son, which will never really come.
I bury those thoughts away and nod, turning out of the cabin without another word and leading Warren back into the workshop.
Today, I’m working with a bright white aspen wood from a tree I found felled in the forest. It took me weeks to finish processing the entire thing, but from the moment I saw it, I knew I wanted to make something smooth, continuous.
“It’s beautiful,” Warren says when I pull out the pieces and show them all to him. It’s a variation on what he always says — he loves whatever I’m working on — but I feel the need to tell him more about it, anyway.
“No screws or metal of any kind,” I say, pulling out the custom dowels I’ve made, slightly oblong. “Only glue. I thought metal would compromise the integrity of the piece. Wanted the wood to stand on its own, like a tree does.”
I walk him through what the rest of the process is going to look like, how I plan to hand-cut the pieces to make sure they’re perfect. Planing and shaping to pull out the best grain from the wood. The special glue I’m using and how it will create a lithe, but strong, frame.
And, finally, shallow, intricate carvings along the arms and legs that feel right to me, with how I found the tree in the woods. How I labored to bring it back to the wood shop. The way this tree has gained a second life through my hands and ideas.
When I’m done, the look on Warren’s face is near wonder. I take a step back, remembering seeing it on others’ faces, back before I learned my lesson about putting my creative work out there.
“Listen,” Warren says, putting his hands in the air and shaking his head, “I’m not going to force you to do it, man.
And I won’t keep needling you about it. But I meant what I said about it.
I think you should be sharing this with people.
I think there are a lot of people who would want to hear what I just heard. ”
I get Warren out the door and get back to working on my carvings. At least he won’t be needling me about it anymore.
Because the worst part isn’t that it’s annoying.
The worst part is that I’m starting to believe him.