The Pine Boxes His Class Built

The Year He Got Sick

The spring Dale got his diagnosis, we sat in the truck in the clinic parking lot, and I will tell you what he worried about, because it tells you everything about the man.

He did not cry about himself. He did not talk about the time he had left or the things he would miss.

He looked out the windshield and he said, “Ruth, who’s going to open the shop when the next family calls?”

I was angry at him for a flash, I will be honest. I wanted him to be scared for us, for me, and here he was scared for strangers who had not even lost anyone yet.

But that was the whole of him, right there. He could not stand the thought of a family in our county, some winter after he was gone, being talked into a debt they could not carry, because the one man who would have built them a box for free was in the ground himself.

He tried to keep the shop going through the summer. The school let him, out of respect, even after he officially retired.

A call came in July, a young mother, and Dale could not stand at the bench more than twenty minutes at a stretch by then.

So he sat on a stool and he directed, and three of the current boys did the building while he talked them through it.

That was the last one he saw finished. He came home gray in the face and slept fourteen hours, and he said it was worth every minute.

After that he could not do it anymore, and the calls, when they came, I did not know what to tell the funeral home.

I lay awake over it. Dale lay awake over it. It was the one piece of his life he could not figure out how to hand off.

Finding Cody

It was me who figured it out, in the end, and I am prouder of that than of almost anything I have done.

In September, when Dale was mostly in bed, I got in the truck one morning and I drove to the lumberyard on the county road, because I remembered a name.

Cody Mills had been one of Dale’s boys, maybe the best with his hands Dale ever taught. He had graduated around twenty years back and gone off and I had lost track of him.

But I had heard he was back in the county, running a cabinet shop out of a pole barn, doing kitchens for people building new houses out by the lake.

The man at the lumberyard told me where to find him.

Cody’s shop smelled just like Dale’s, and when I walked in he was bent over a run of cabinet doors, and he was older and heavier but I knew him.

I told him who I was. His face changed. He asked about Dale, and I told him the truth, that it would not be long.