The Chest My Daughter Carried Home

I should have said of course. I should have said, I was angry, I did not mean it. Instead I put my hand flat on the lid of that chest, which we had carried out to the shop that week to replace a hinge, and I said, “Then take it. See how it sits in a room full of cardboard.”

She did not say another word. She backed her car up to the shop door. She and Ebbe carried the chest out between them without speaking, and he looked at me over the top of it with a face I had never seen on him before. She tied it into the hatchback with a moving blanket and two yellow straps. She hugged her father. She did not hug me.

She drove out of the lot and onto the county road, and she did not come back, and she did not call.

The week after she left, I took her room apart.

I want to be honest about that, too. I told Ebbe I was “getting the room ready for a guest,” and he looked at me and said nothing.

I carried the spool bed down the stairs piece by piece, and the vanity, the desk, the chair, the washstand, the bookcase, and the rocker, and I put them in the back bay of the shop under a drop cloth, where the humidity was steady.

I told myself it was practical. Which was true. The finish on all of them was tired.

And the truth underneath was that I could not stand the room being furnished and empty at the same time.

The first piece I did was the spool bed, over eleven weekends the winter after she left.

The old finish was alligatored, the way varnish gets after sixty years of warming and cooling, and it took three passes of stripper and a great deal of fine steel wool to get down to clean maple.

One spindle was split along a seam, so I took the bed apart, steamed the joint open, and glued it back with hot hide glue, because hide glue can be undone someday by the next person with a kettle. That has always been my rule.

I do not use anything on a piece that the next restorer cannot take back out. I did not notice until years later that it was the opposite of how I handled my own daughter. With her I had used something permanent.

The second year I did the vanity. The third year, the little desk. The fourth year I touched nothing, and nobody asked me why. The fifth, the ladder-back chair, every rung re-glued and the seat woven with fresh splint.

The sixth, the bookcase Ebbe built from the barn door, with the least stripper possible, because every nail hole in it was his. The seventh, the washstand, whose marble top had cracked, so I had a man in Mankato fit a new one.

Ebbe’s heart gave out in the spring of the fourth year.

He had a heart attack in the shop, between a chair and a kitchen table, and he sat down on an upturned bucket and said, “Tilly, I do not feel right.” I rode with him in the ambulance the thirty miles to the hospital in the county seat.

He lived eleven days. I want to say that I called Renata the first hour, but I called her the second day. I got her voicemail.

I said her father was in the hospital and I hung up, and I thought, if she wants to come, she will come.