Scraps of Summer

1. Alone in Montana

Alone in Montana

This view is wasted on me. You’d do so much more with all these colors.

Gus lifted his worn sketchbook and flipped the paper around its binding to a fresh page.

He looked back through his closed window, lost in a daze.

He breathed in his nerves and forced out his fears.

The Chevy Blazer turned down a small, winding road, and Gus noticed the weathered Livingston, Montana sign he hadn’t seen in thirteen years.

Amber sunset melted to a purple evening, and no more city lights lit their way.

His father’s car soon crossed the same old army bridge Gus used to collect frogs under.

His head swayed as they bumped over the same train tracks he used to practice balancing on, until finally, he saw it—the secluded log cabin that housed all his childhood memories.

After all these years, Gus wondered if the home would still smell like his mother’s rosy pink perfume he missed so much. He sighed. Gus shook the thought away.

The Chevy came to a stop in the driveway of his father’s quaint cabin surrounded by pine trees.

A small flowing creek trickled nearby. Gus stepped out of the car and surveyed the flat, utilitarian property he remembered so well.

Beautiful behemoth mountains loomed far off in the distance, so tall they pierced the white clouds above.

To Gus’s right stood his dad’s woodshop with its weathered green sign that read Shepard’s Custom Furniture hanging above it.

The wooden placard was covered in shriveled leaves that blew away in the breeze.

Dan Shepard shut his car door. Gravel crunched beneath his feet as he walked around the rear bumper to meet Gus. The taciturn middle-aged lumberjack looked the boy up and down, still not used to his visiting son’s height.

“You’ve grown a lot, Gus,” Dan mumbled as he opened the trunk. “All your stuff is still in your old room.”

Gus tried to offer his father a faint smile, but the gesture was lost as the man forged ahead with his suitcase. Dan paused under the dimming yellow porch light and offered a dull, tired nod to his son.

“Get settled. Need you up early to explain the shop,” Dan informed him.

Gus nodded. “Yes, sir. Thank you.”

He was so exhausted. His bones were heavy.

A familiar warmth eased that burden as Gus entered the home he once knew so well.

Not much had changed, yet the heat felt different somehow.

He walked through the hallway, passing empty log cabin walls.

He stopped and stared at the darker squares of wood amid the otherwise sun-bleached paneling. When did he take Mom’s paintings down?

He lugged his suitcase up the creaking wooden stairs to his cramped attic bedroom. Gus looked around the space he’d grown up in. Over the past decade, it had become merely excess storage space. Several dusty boxes towered high.

Gus dropped his bags near his childhood bed, which hadn’t been touched in ages. It stood perfectly made, ready in case he had ever come to visit. Did Dad want me here sooner?

His duvet on the bed was still his old one covered in bucking quarter horses and roaming cowboys.

Gus sat down on the spring mattress and absentmindedly placed his sketchbook and leather canvas backpack on the bedside table.

But it wasn’t his previous end table. It was something different now—a wooden trunk with deep grooves he had never seen before.

Gus scoped out the object, lost on where it could have come from or how his dad had gotten the heavy thing all the way up to his room.

He tilted his head in thought. The trunk had a little brass padlock.

Gus tugged the lock down, trying to open the hefty wooden box.

It did not budge. He shook his head and shrugged, too tired to think any longer.

He pulled off his baggy sweater, faded jeans, and sweaty socks, tossing them to the side to deal with in the morning.

Gus yawned wide and turned off the lamp near his headboard.

After lying down and pulling his sheets over his torso, he drifted to sleep.

Dan’s screeching tea kettle and the aromatic allure of freshly roasted coffee beans were a natural alarm that woke Gus up just hours later.

The morning sunlight poured onto Gus’s soft skin as he rolled over in his boxers.

He sat up and rubbed his eyes. Alone in the dusty attic, Gus sighed, remembering this was his new normal.

He slugged down the stairs to join his father in the kitchen. Sunny-side eggs and herbed sausages sizzled in a cast-iron skillet. Gus paused in his steps when he saw their wooden dining table set for two. Only two.

“Hey, kid,” Dan grunted as he flipped the eggs onto a plate.

Gus yawned a “Morning” and scraped back an oak chair to take his seat.

Dan placed two plates of fried eggs, crispy sausage links, and buttered toast on the table.

He hiked up his overalls before he sat down and poured two cups of coffee from his tin French press: one for himself and one for Gus.

Dan took a sip. Coffee caught in his graying beard as he sliced coins of sausage.

There was an awkward silence as they both ate their breakfast. Gus hesitantly looked up at his father as he spread huckleberry jam across his toast. They both had been avoiding crucial conversations.

“So. What happened to all of Mom’s pictures?” Gus ventured.

Dan glanced up from the brim of his coffee cup. He said nothing.

“Before she… passed…” Gus cleared his throat. “She said you were lonely way out here. She—”

Dan grunted to avoid Gus’s reach for connection. The aging man stood up from the table and swung on his Carhartt work jacket.

“Finish up,” Dan muttered. “I’m going to the shop.”

Gus sighed and turned to watch Dan plod off. He should have known he wasn’t going to get much out of his pragmatic father.

“What are we working on today?” Gus called out.

“An oak dining set. Two more chairs to square things up,” Dan responded. He grabbed keys off a small hook near the door.

Gus nodded and downed his eggs as his dad pulled on his work boots and exited the cabin. Gus stuffed a last piece of toast into his mouth and followed.

Behind their home sat the large barn that was his father’s woodshop.

Gus walked inside to see all sorts of carpentry machines for sawing, sanding, and cutting.

Wooden boards lay scattered about, dry sawdust clung to every surface, and motes swirled in the sun gleaming through the wide windows.

Gus watched his father lift a huge stack of untreated boards and lower them next to his cluttered workbench.

“Summer job starts now.” Dan adjusted his overalls and looked down at Gus. “May as well put you to work before you’re gone for art college.”

Gus nodded with hesitation. He had never used the machines.

Before the divorce, before he and his mother moved to Minnesota, he had grown up only playing in the yard outside while his father worked all day.

Now, though, no longer too young to operate the equipment, he was determined to learn so he could spend at least a few good months with his distant dad.

He’d rather reconcile over woodwork than remain strangers stuck in the same house all summer.

Dan gestured at Gus. “Grab a couple more of those two-by-fours.”

Gus turned to the wall that held dozens of variously sized boards on organized shelves. He had no idea which ones were two-by-fours but grabbed a stack.

Dan stopped him. “That’s a four-by-four.”

Gus put the lumber back and grabbed some skinnier pieces of wood. They were correct. He struggled to lift the heavy boards onto the bench.

Dan measured some oak and marked it in three places.

Gus pulled out a little journal to take notes.

His dad lined up each piece of wood, trimmed the ends to equal lengths, and tossed the scraps into a bucket near the shop’s furnace.

Gus quickly learned the ins and outs of the machines as his father demonstrated proper techniques and grunted what mistakes would end in a mangled finger.

In total, Dan spoke only a short few sentences over the workday.

Gus gleaned his dad felt no need to over-chat, and the constant blare of the machines complicated the chore of catching up anyway.

When Gus left for a few moments to collect a new armful of heavy boards, the harsh buzzing from the saw seemed deafening.

“Is it always this loud?” Wincing, Gus placed the boards on the workbench and covered his ears as Dan worked on cutting a detailed edge with a particularly grating jigsaw. Dan didn’t hear his son.

“Dad?!” Gus called out.

Still nothing.

Gus tapped Dan’s shoulder, and his father lifted one of his protective earcups.

“What?! Sorry. My hearin’s bad,” he yelled back.

Gus chuckled. “Yeah. No wonder.”

The hours passed. Gus mostly shadowed Dan’s procedures, ran to retrieve more wood, burned excess scraps in the furnace, or cleaned up behind his father.

However, he performed well, and Dan soon let Gus test out the smaller machines himself.

Dan steamed and bent the oak as Gus assembled chair pieces.

Soon father and son worked side by side, both using electric sanders at the same time.

Dan looked over at Gus periodically, checking his form.

Gus knew he did something right when his dad would simply nod, saying nothing.

However, it wasn’t until Gus was tasked with brushing dark polish onto the smooth wood, revealing its luscious weaving grain, that the first spark of pride in his own carpentry came to him that first day.

Polishing, to Gus, felt exactly like painting: each new stroke revealed something beautiful and unexpected.