The Loft Above the Shop
The thing is, I did not think Kurt was a bad man. I thought he was a man doing to a boy exactly what was done to him, and calling it a gift because the other choice was admitting it hurt.
I have known a lot of men like that. Some days I have been one.
Weekends five and six were drywall and finish. We hung five-eighths Type X on everything facing the shop, half-inch on the bedroom side, and Dad taped every seam himself because he said I mud like a drunk raccoon.
We built the stairs out of pine treads I bought from a sawmill near Pierz, and Dad turned the railing posts on his old lathe in his basement. The railing was clear pine with a hand-rubbed finish, and it was the most beautiful thing in my shop by a mile.
Kelly came out the Sunday of the fifth weekend to paint. She picked a soft gray-blue she said looked like the lake in October. She painted every wall and never once asked why it mattered so much to me.
She knew. She had heard me on the phone with Brody at night. She had seen me sitting in the dark in the shop. Halfway through the second coat, she came down the ladder and hugged me from behind while I was cutting baseboard.
“He’s going to love it,” she said into my shoulder.
“I don’t know what he’s going to think,” I said. “Maybe he thinks I’m trying to take him from his mom.”
“He’s going to think his dad saw him,” she said. “That’s what he’s going to think.”
She went to the church bazaar the next weekend and came back with a quilt somebody’s grandmother had made, a log cabin pattern in reds and browns. She paid forty dollars for it and folded it at the foot of the new bed and went home without making a fuss.
On the last Saturday, the sixth weekend, everything was done but the trim. Dad sent me to town for brad nails and told me to take my time. When I got back, Dad had gone up into the loft alone.
“Dad?” I called up.
“Don’t come up,” he said. “I’m busy.”
I heard a scraping sound, slow and careful, and then a tapping like a mallet on a chisel. It went on for an hour. I sat at my workbench and cleaned injectors and did not go up those stairs.
When he finally came down, he had wood shavings in his white hair and on his flannel. His eyes were wet, and he would not look at me.
“What were you doing up there?” I asked.
“Trim,” he said, and went out to his truck and sat in it for ten minutes with the engine off before he drove home.
On Sunday, I asked Brody to come out to the shop. I told him I needed help moving a rear end. He came straight over after church, still in his red school team hoodie, the one he wore almost every day, even though he had quit.
Dad was already there. He was standing beside the new stairs in his suspenders, his hands at his sides, smiling like a kid on Christmas morning.
Brody stopped just inside the door. He looked at his grandpa, and then at me, and then up the wooden staircase to the loft with its new wood railing. His shaggy hair was in his eyes, and he pushed it back.
“What is that?” he said.