The Loft Above the Shop
I was standing by the workbench in my gray work shirt with the sleeves rolled up, the welder and the bench vise behind me. I had a single brass key in my hand. I had been holding it so long it was warm.
I held it out to him.
“It’s yours,” I said. “It’s a bedroom. It’s got a bed and a dresser and a desk and its own heat. It’s got a window you can climb out of if the shop ever catches fire, which it won’t.”
He did not take the key. He just stood there in the middle of the shop, nearly as tall as me and skinny as a fence post, staring at it.
“How much?” he said finally.
It is the worst thing anybody has ever asked me. My own son, sixteen, standing in my shop, asking how much it would cost him to sleep under my roof.
“Nothing,” I said. My voice came out rough. “No rent. Not now. Not ever. You can stay out here any night you want, and you can stay at your mom’s any night you want, and nobody charges you for either one.”
He took the key then. He held it in his palm and looked at it like it might be a trick.
“Can I still go out for the team?” he said.
I could not answer him. I tried, and nothing came out. Dad answered for me, from the bottom of the stairs.
“That’s the whole point, bud,” Dad said. “Go on up and look.”
Brody went up the stairs two at a time, the way he goes up everything. Dad and I followed slower. When we got to the top, he was standing in the middle of the room, turning in a slow circle.
He looked at the bed with Kelly’s quilt. He looked at the desk I had built out of an old oak door. He looked at the window and the smoke alarm and the baseboard heat, and then he looked up.
There is a beam that runs across the top of the room, a big six-by-ten Dad and I had set to carry the new roof framing. Carved into the face of it, in neat letters an inch tall, was his name. Brody Gene Lindquist. And under it, the year.
Brody reached up and ran his fingers over the letters. He is tall enough now that he did not even have to stretch.
“Grandpa,” he said.
Dad cleared his throat. “My dad carved my name in the haymow beam in our old barn when I turned sixteen,” he said. “He said a man should know there’s a place in the world with his name on it.
“The barn came down in ’98. I figured you ought to have one that’s still standing.”
Brody turned around and hugged his grandpa. He had to bend down to do it.
Dad held on to him for a long time, patting his back with one big rough hand, and I went and looked out the egress window at the yard for a while, because I needed to.
Brody went out for basketball that November. Tryouts were the third week, and he made varsity. He cut his hours to ten a week, Saturdays and one weeknight, and the manager said she would rather have him ten hours than not at all.
He started staying in the loft three or four nights a week. He would drive out after practice, eat whatever I had on the stove, do his homework at the oak desk and go to bed by ten.