The Woodshop She Sold Before The Funeral

“I was in the shower,” she said. “What’s wrong.”

“Earl Dunnigan says there’s a man loading Dad’s shop onto a trailer right now.”

A pause. Long enough that I knew she already had her answer ready, had maybe had it ready for days, the way you get a lie ready, except I don’t think to this day Charlene thought of it as a lie. I think she thought of it as something that needed doing and she was the one who had to do it.

“That’s Denny Prewitt,” she said. “He does buyouts. I called him Tuesday.”

“You sold Dad’s shop.”

“Russ, honey, your daddy is not coming back to use it. You know that. I know that’s hard to hear two days before we bury him but it’s true, and I was not going to leave that building sitting there for a year with everybody’s hands all over it and everybody fighting about who gets the good chisels. I did what needed doing.”

“You could have waited one week, Charlene. One week until after the funeral. Until I was there to go through it.”

“And then what, Russ. Then you and your sister and whoever else decides they’ve got some claim stand around that shop for three days picking through it and it turns into a fight, and I am the one who has to live in that house afterward with everybody mad at everybody. I have seen it happen, Russ. I watched it happen to my own sister when her husband passed. I was not going to let that be me.”

“How much did he pay you.”

Another pause. “Eleven hundred dollars.”

I did not say anything. The road kept coming at me, mile markers flicking past, and Kim’s hand was tight on my arm now, and somewhere in my chest something that had been holding steady since the hospital call two nights before started to come apart at the seams, quiet, the way a seam goes when the thread is old.

“Eleven hundred dollars,” I said.

“For the whole building’s worth, Russ, I know it doesn’t sound like much to you, but Denny said that’s fair for a quick buyout where he’s not getting to go through it piece by piece and sell it right. He took it all as is. I didn’t have the strength to stand there and dicker with him, Russ. I just wanted it gone.”

“Dad built that workbench with his own father in 1974.”

“I know what your daddy built, Russ. I lived with it for eleven years. I watched him stand at that bench every evening even after the chemo, even when his hands shook so bad he couldn’t hold a chisel steady, because it was the only place in this world he still felt like himself, and I am the one who had to watch that, every single night, and I am the one who had to sit in that house the last three weeks while he could not even walk out there anymore, and look at that empty shop through the kitchen window and know he was never going back to it. You were not here for that part, Russ. You came on the weekends. I was here.”