Inside, folded in quarters, were his drawings. Pencil on graph paper, from 1975. Every section, every joist, every bolt hole, the leg spacing, the cross bracing, all of it lettered in that square block printing every electrician my father’s age learned on blueprints.
“I kept them in case,” he said.
“In case of what?”
“In case somebody ever needed to build it again,” he said, and Kip looked at me, and I looked at the drawings, because neither one of us could look at Dad right then.
Kip unfolded the top sheet like it was a treasure map. In the margin, in Dad’s printing, it said: Deck boards 2×6, 3/8 gap, crown up. Then underneath, in different pencil, smaller: M. wants a bench at the end. Next year.
There had never been a bench. There had been Mom’s lawn chair for forty-seven years instead.
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“Why didn’t you ever build her the bench?” Kip asked.
Dad smiled for the first time that weekend. “She said the chair was better. She said a bench you can’t turn toward the sun.”
On Monday I went to the lumberyard in town on my lunch break. I worked the list off Dad’s drawings with the man at the counter, an older fellow named Alton who has been cutting lumber there since I was in grade school.
Forty-four cedar two by sixes, eight feet long, for decking. Fifteen treated two by sixes for the frames. Carriage bolts, lag screws, a box of coated deck screws, and two new steel foot plates to replace the bent ones. It came to $1,460 with tax.
Alton read Dad’s drawings over my shoulder while he rang it up. He tapped the margin with his pencil, where it said crown up.
“Your dad wrote that,” he said. “Gunnar Halvorson.”
“He did.”
“He taught me to read a crown on a board when I was nineteen,” Alton said. “Right here in this yard. I’ll knock ten percent off for that.”
I tried to tell him no. He had already done it.
The legs I didn’t need to buy. They were lying in the grass by Leah’s shed where Brett had thrown them. Galvanized pipe, inch and a half, with the threaded collars Dad had used to set the height. Steel doesn’t burn. Brett had at least left us that.
That Friday after work, Kip and I loaded the lumber on my trailer and drove north. We got to the lake at quarter to six with three hours of light left, and we unloaded everything by the shed, and we didn’t start building. Dad’s drawings said measure twice, and I wanted the morning.
Leah came out and stood on the porch. She asked if we wanted supper. I said we had sandwiches. She stood there a minute longer and then she went in. I didn’t make it hard for her. I didn’t make it easy either.
Saturday morning I had Kip up at five thirty. The sun was already well over the pines and the lake was flat as a plate. We had coffee and powdered donuts on the tailgate, and then I handed him a tape measure and a carpenter’s pencil.
“Read me the first number,” I said.
He unfolded the drawing. “Side rails, ninety-six inches. Joists every twenty-four, on center.”
“What’s on center?”
He didn’t know, and he wasn’t ashamed to say so, and I was proud of him for that. I showed him. I showed him how to hook the tape, how to mark a crow’s foot so you know which side of the line to cut, how to check a corner with three, four and five.