by Dan Robson
The basement was hockey cards, Slinkys, Play-Doh, Nerf guns, My Little Pony, and My Little Monster. It was Christmas mornings and birthday parties. It was the Secret Garden; it was Narnia. It was popsicles and ice cream cake. It was kids who had it all, and exhausted parents fretting over adult things to keep it that way. It was fist fights and tantrums and tears.
Under the plans Dad proposed, the basement’s cold concrete would be hidden beneath a warm layer of carpet and the marked-up grey walls and yellow insulation would be boxed in by a layer of smooth, painted drywall. The wooden rafters would be hidden by ceiling tiles.
And we’d do it all ourselves.
I went with Dad to the hardware store to pick up the wood for framing. Later, I watched as he meticulously measured each piece with the pencil he kept behind his ear. He cut each one with his mitre saw, filling the basement with clouds of sawdust. I picked up the pieces as they fell and stacked them to the side.
Dad would wear an old T-shirt and faded dad jeans, loose through the thighs and tapering in at the ankle, tucked into his clunky brown steel-toe boots. He kept his measuring tape in a brown leather tool belt slung around his waist. His forehead always carried the slight sheen of sweat as he worked. It was serious, focused business. Each squealing press to the wood with the spinning blade was exacting. It was cut clean and quick. He never missed the mark. I remember collecting the fallen ends and seeing the perfect symmetry with which the blade had erased the thin pencil line Dad had drawn. It had become dust.
* * *
—
The Great Basement Cleanout happens on a rainy spring afternoon. We’re all there: Jai, Jenna, Mom, and me.
Before we can start the new renovation, we have to clear out the old completely. Dad would never have believed it could happen. It’s never been done. Since the day we moved in way back in the summer of 1988—when I turned five—this place has been accumulating the remnants of our family. But now a large metal garbage bin sits in our driveway and there is no avoiding it.
We stare at the boxes stacked on the shelves Dad built when we first moved in. An overflow piles up in front of them, along the wall and down the unfinished side of the basement—running the entire width of our house. It spills out into the finished part of the basement, too, from terracotta wall to terracotta wall, covering the carpeted floor with boxes, books, and gift-wrapping paper left out months before.
Where did it all come from? And why had we kept it?
As we added layer upon layer to the great collection of our lives, we had, of course, become something approaching hoarders. Dad always fought this. He wanted to clear out as much as possible. He was the least sentimental when it came to this collection of “stuff.” I’m certain that one of his deepest desires was to live a clutter-free life, but his family had refused him that one perfectly reasonable wish. Even when he successfully managed to bring some order to things we’d accumulated by clearing out some of the most useless pieces and making a trip to the dump or to Goodwill, there’d just be a new box of something else to take its place. Tidiness was always fleeting in our home. It was not the natural order of things—especially in the basement.
The boxes had started to fill since my parents’ wedding day, with things like the casserole dishes they never unpacked and the fondue set they brought out once or twice in the eighties when dipping forked food in hot oil was cool. We all knew that none of us would ever use the blue-and-white cross-country skis that had leaned against the wall by the furnace since the early nineties. Or the wooden tennis racquet that hadn’t been used since the seventies, or the set of golf clubs from that long-ago time when woods were made of actual wood. We clung to them anyway.
The end of each school semester or new move to an apartment brought crates of barely cracked, hundred-dollar textbooks and notebooks filled with illegible scribble. Because you never know when you’ll need to read that 1342-page brick of a text known as Introduction to Contemporary Civilization in the West, Third Edition, Volume I.
There are two old fridges along the wall next to Dad’s workbench and the shelves he put up for storage. A large “Robson Renovations” magnet—with its brown-and-orange font—is stuck to the side of one of them. He put the decal on his truck when he ran his own renovation company, back around the time we were born.
There is an artificial Christmas tree and boxes of decorations that haven’t been touched in two decades. There are old tea cups and candlesticks. A punch bowl on top of one of the fridges. There are bankers boxes of old bills and legal documents. And tools piled in milk crates on top and below the workbench. There are paintbrushes and hammers. Sandpaper. Wrenches. Boxes of screws, nails, and used light bulbs. Coils of electrical wire. Caulking guns. The chalkboard we used as kids leans against the wall on top of the workbench, with Merry Christmas scrawled in my father’s handwriting in chalk. There is an open bottle of pest control poison. Half-used cans of paint, labelled in his rigid, precise print: Jai’s Old Room—just in case cotton-candy pink comes back in style. Eggshell enamel. Semi-transparent wood stain.
“Look, Jai,” I say to my sister, pointing at the easel Dad made for us, long since covered in the splashed-on paint and scribbled designs from our childhood creative art sessions.
“That’s in pretty poor condition,” she says.
“We’re not getting rid of it,” I say.
“But we could repaint it—maybe white?”
“It has all your artwork on it,” I point out. “No.”
There are three slim brown boxes filled with plastic cases holding old photo slides. Jai reads out the labels: “Andrew and Marion’s cottage, 1980…1979…”
“We should get those slides into something we can watch them on,” Jenna says.
She’s clearly not aware that such devices have existed as long as slides have.
Jai laughs. “Ladies and gentlemen, our sister…”
Jenna rolls her eyes.
Jai fiddles with the lid before she pries open another set of slides.
“Cross-country skiing—1982,” she says. “I was there. I was one month old. Dad tucked me in the front of his jacket and skied with me. For real, this happened.”
She flips through a few more.
“Randy and Lynn’s wedding, in Georgia, 1979—Baseball!—John and Brenda—Monica and John.”
Evidence of a time before us.
We shift to the stacks of National Geographic magazines that I used to flip through, learning about faraway places where I might travel. They sit in a box beneath my father’s old drafting table, where he’d lay out the blueprints for the projects he was working on. A couple dozen of those blueprints lean in the corner and others are rolled up in a long plastic bin. All the pages have started to turn light brown and are curling at the edges like a trove of ancient treasure maps.
Slowly, the shelves begin to clear.
We open a box of colourful plush animals.
“What are these things called?” Jai asks.
“Jelly Bellies?” I say from the other side of the room.
“No. Jenna, what are these called?”
“What?” She walks down the stairs.
“Oh!” she says, in the overly excited voice that can properly be described as an exclamation, which we’ve mocked her for since she was young. “My Beanie Babies!”
She was once a Beanie Baby aficionado. There are dozens of these little stuffed creatures. Some are in glass cases, special edition collector’s items.
“We can’t get rid of these,” she says.
“We have to,” I say. “Or take them to your house. You live somewhere else now.”
She ignores me and picks up a booklet inside the box. It’s a Beanie Babies price guide.
“Market value,” she says, flipping through.
Jenna sets the box in the pile of things we plan to keep, which has grown much larger th
an we intended.
The sun is falling and a golden light shines through the tiny basement window above the spare fridge. Beside it, an electrical panel holds a maze of intertwining wires. It looks like an elaborate bomb from the movies, when it’s impossible to guess which wire to cut. We avoid it entirely.
We’ve spent an entire day at it. The blue garbage bin on the driveway is nearly full. Most of the shelves are bare, exposing the yellow insulation behind the warped plywood.
Jai notes the doorway into the storage area that Dad had framed in place in order to add the extra bedroom and bathroom during that initial renovation. Instead, there are two side-by-side doors to the same unfinished place. Reminders of past intentions to use the space for something practical. We all know that we’re more sifting through the past than preparing for a renovation. We’re bringing memories back to life before letting them go. And we’re returning to those past intentions because for the past year everything has felt unfinished. We’re completing the job for him now.
* * *
—
We take a quick break for dinner upstairs. Sitting at the kitchen table, Mom starts a conversation we’ve tried hard to delay.
It’s April. Next month is the anniversary of our father’s death. It’s a cliché to say that something feels like it was yesterday, but my head spins trying to put together a year without him. So much has happened, but nothing at all. It’s an unsettling feeling to understand what that means. Time has never felt this blurry before.
A week after that, it will be his birthday. We’ve already pushed through so many difficult moments without him—all our birthdays, the wedding, Christmas.
What will we do on the anniversary of his death?
It’s not a day I’m eager to remember, I say. Jai agrees—she wants to “avoid being crippled by it,” she says. But what’s the right thing to do? What are you supposed to do? Is there protocol for this kind of thing?
And what about Dad’s birthday? We seem more interested in celebrating that, even though he never was. That’s something we can handle, we all agree—but we’re just nodding, making no specific plans. And we move on.
His ashes are upstairs in their bedroom. Mom’s bedroom, now. We haven’t decided what to do with them yet. That decision feels too final. This is the first time we’ve spoken of it at any length.
“I don’t know what Dad wanted,” Mom says. “We never talked about it.”
But she wants to bury his ashes in the ground. She wants a place she can visit—something permanent, a place that says he was here, that he existed, and that he mattered.
That seems too morbid to us. A cemetery? We couldn’t imagine Dad wanting his ashes placed in another row of dead people.
“Who likes a cemetery?” Jai says.
A long pause.
“Some people do,” Mom says. “Old women do.”
Meaning her, I think.
We move on quickly, again. Because, again, no one wants to talk about it.
7
Thick black dress socks, folded once over—lined in perfect rows. White athletic socks, cut just above the ankle, each pair rolled into a tidy ball. Beside them, a pill container filled with spare change.
That’s how he left them, and that’s how they remain.
I open the drawer in the closet, beneath the shelf where he kept his Dolce & Gabbana cologne (a gift from Mom) and his watches (an aluminum Swiss Army one, and one with a black leather band and a rectangular gold-rimmed face, likely from Costco).
As with the items on his desk, I’ve tried to keep everything in place. It’s an act of preservation, as though if we just kept waiting, keeping everything as it was, Dad will eventually come back. His dress shirts and sweaters hang from the rack beside the drawers. Beside the bed are his reading glasses, a Swiss Army knife, and his prescription hydrocortisone cream, all still tucked in a table that his alarm clock sat on.
I’m irritated when anyone else moves something that belongs to him. I’ve watched over his tools in the garage to make sure none go missing. When one of his closest friends asked to use the driver from his golf bag for an upcoming tournament they were supposed to play in together, I handed it over reluctantly—and then made up a lie about playing the next week and needing it back right away.
So, the socks—I pick out a pair of white ones.
It’s early Monday morning. I’ve slept over at the house, again, knowing that Matt wants to get an early start on the basement. But I forgot to bring socks, so Dad’s will have to do. I pull the neatly tucked ball apart and put them on carefully. They feel too thick for athletic socks. The band ends an inch above my ankle. As far as socks go, they’re terrible. They’re “dad socks.” I’ll never wear them in public, but this morning they feel right.
Next to his tool bag in the laundry room I find his workboots, which have also not moved since the day he died. I slide into them. They’re too wide on the sides and I can wiggle my toes freely, although I can’t feel how far they reach because of the steel toe. I tug the laces as tight as I can and tie them. The leather work belt sits on top of the tools in the tool bag. I pick it up and wrap it around my waist. It’s rough and faded. I remember Dad wearing it when I was young; I figure it’s the only one he’d ever owned. I clip the clasp and spin the belt around so the pouches hang at my side, as I imagine a carpenter would. It fits a little too well—better than it would have a year ago. I fill it with the things I imagine will be useful: the old hammer with its worn leather strap, a few screwdrivers with different heads, a big silver tape measure, a flat orange carpenter pencil that I sharpen with a metal retracting knife. Then I pull on a pair of black work gloves I’d found tucked inside a pocket in the front of the tool bag, completing my look.
I’m dressed the part when Matt arrives at seven-thirty a.m. The bed of his mint-green pickup truck holds a garbage can, a ladder, and a roll of insulation stacked on top of two-by-fours that have been piled several feet above the lip, everything tied down by a single strap. A large tool box teeters on one side of the bed and an air compressor angles off the other.
He parks behind my old silver Honda Civic (a landmark since its battery failed years ago), next to the dumpster.
We’ve made it this far.
Jonathan Jacobs, Matt’s partner and apprentice, looks the part too. He’s in his early twenties and tall, probably six three, with light black skin, glasses, a blue fleece, faded jeans, and workboots. As he starts to unload the truck he looks over and nods, balancing several long pieces of wood on his shoulder.
Tim arrives a few minutes later, after dropping Jenna off at the community outreach centre she helps run in downtown Brampton. If Jonathan’s construction superpower is his height, Tim’s is his Hulk strength. He’s a fitness expert, with an affinity for wearing a disproportionate amount of plaid. He also wears brown, worn-out Sperry boat shoes everywhere he goes, from the gym to, apparently, construction sites.
Matt’s in skinny jeans and a white T layered over a grey long-sleeved shirt. He’s the slimmest of the bunch but also the operation’s alpha, chipper and eager to get moving. He seems to be a few coffees deep as he heads downstairs, telling me how job one is to figure out how to get the long two-by-fours into the basement with the least amount of collateral damage.
We decide to pass the wood through a small basement window on the side of the house in the backyard—one of the single sources of natural light on either side of the house that isn’t covered by the deck. I’m not sure that window has ever been opened. But with a couple of tugs it squeaks back—an opening wide enough to pass a couple of two-by-fours through at a time. Tim stays in the basement to pull in the lumber we pass down to him.
Pulling the wood off the bed of Matt’s truck feels like a life-sized game of Jenga. I have no idea how he managed to get to our house without leaving a trail of lumber in his wake. We fumble with as many pieces of wood as we
can, carrying them to the side of the house and then sliding them down through the window to Tim, who stacks the rows neatly, each the same height, perfectly aligned.
When all of the wood is unloaded, we get started with the unfinished portion of the basement—where the new bedroom and bathroom will go. The area that Dad didn’t manage to complete. It’s a dusty grey canvas now. Matt lays out the plans, which, it turns out, are more of a mental map than a blueprint.
This feels wrong. It’s not the way my father would approach a project like this. The endless files he’s left behind are enough evidence of that. I don’t mean to dismiss Matt’s approach, or that of any other contractor—but I just know that Dad would have started from a plan and stuck to that plan. It has a sobering impact on the spirit in which I entered this project. I set out to walk in my father’s boots, to use his tools the way he did, but already I feel like a boy pretending.
* * *
—
First we’ll mark the location of the studs (the vertical lengths of wood extending from floor to ceiling) that will make up our walls, Matt tells us. He crouches down and lays out his tape measure just off the wall where the fridge used to be.
“A two-by-four is three and a half inches, and there’s a half-inch of drywall on each side,” he says, making a mark with his pencil. “So it’s four and half inches.”
“Yep,” I say, as though it’s something I already know.
He scratches parallel lines with his orange carpenter’s pencil and stands up.
“So,” he says, pointing to the pencil markings on the floor. “There’s a wall right there.”
I look at the lines. It takes me a moment to realize that he’s marked the start of a wall that will divide the bedroom from the bathroom, four and a half inches wide.