The Chest My Daughter Carried Home

The last thing I said to my daughter in my own shop was that she had turned her back on everything her father and I ever built, and I said it with my hand flat on her great-great-grandmother’s dower chest.

That was eight years before last Thanksgiving, and it took me until then to take it back.

I have been trying to take it back ever since, but not with my mouth. I have been trying with a cabinet scraper and a pot of hide glue, which is the coward’s way of saying sorry, and I knew it was the coward’s way the whole time.

My name is Ottilie Brauner. I am sixty-five years old, and I run a furniture refinishing and restoration shop in Marn Station, Minnesota, on the county road between the Cenex and the grain elevator.

My husband Ebbe and I opened it the spring after we married, in a rented machine shed with a dirt floor and one bare bulb. We put a sign over the door that Ebbe lettered himself with a one-inch sash brush.

It said Brauner Refinishing in square white letters, and I will come back to that sign before I am done.

On the Thursday before Thanksgiving last year, at ten past two in the afternoon, I put the last coat of shellac on a cane-seat rocker and set the brush across the top of the can.

Outside, the first real snow of the season was drifting across the elevator lot in flat bright daylight. The shop smelled the way it always smells, like alcohol and beeswax and old pine, and the wood stove in the corner was ticking as it cooled.

Behind a canvas drop cloth in the back bay stood the finished room.

It was not a room, exactly.

It was seven pieces of furniture arranged on the concrete in the order they once stood in a girl’s bedroom on Alder Street: a maple spool bed, a vanity dresser with a swivel mirror, a ladder-back chair, a bookcase my husband built from a barn door, a washstand, a little school desk with an inkwell hole, and now the rocker.

Every one had been stripped, repaired, and finished by my own hands over eight years, one piece at a time.

The only thing missing was a space at the foot of the bed about three and a half feet wide. I had measured the space. I had left it empty on purpose, the way you leave a chair at the table.

I stood looking at that gap with a rag in my hand and I told myself, as I had told myself every November for eight years, that I would call my daughter on Monday.

I heard a truck in the lot. It was Dannick.

Renata is my only child. She came late, when I was twenty-seven and Ebbe was thirty and we had stopped saying out loud that we were waiting. She grew up in that shop.

At nine she sat on an upturned bucket and sanded the back of a drawer front for a dollar, and she did it so carefully the customer, an old man named Tjaden, took off his cap and thanked her as if she were a grown woman.

At fifteen she could French polish a piano bench to a depth you could lose a dime in.

She went to the technical college in St. Cloud for two years and came home talking about design.