by Dan Robson
“All right,” I say.
“And then a bathtub is five feet,” Matt says.
He zips out his tape measure with practised skill and lays down a five-foot measurement from the edge of the last pencil mark he made.
“And then our wall, here—four and a half inches.” He scribbles another line just beyond the last.
He keeps moving.
“There’s our tub.” Matt steps a few feet over to the other side of the room. “And then the toilet’s going to be right here.”
But the imaginary toilet seems way too close to the door Dad had installed. You’d bump right into the toilet as soon as you walked in. I keep my own counsel as Matt mumbles to himself, gesturing to the other side of the imaginary room, waving his hand as though moving the pieces around. We’re half an hour in and already editing on the fly.
After brief deliberations, we keep moving without—I think—a real solution. We use a laser level to mark out the remaining bathroom walls. It shoots a straight red line across the room.
“Now, off this laser line, let’s mark another one out at five feet,” Matt says, but I’m not really sure why.
Tim helps Matt lay out the tape measure. I mark a line at five feet.
“Here we go,” I say, with some enthusiasm.
After a few more measurements, we can see the beginning of what will become the bathroom overlaid on the battered concrete floor.
“It’s going to be tight here,” Matthew warns.
“Should we factor that into what we get in a vanity, then?” I say. “Like get something as narrow as we can?”
“Yeah. Not something that’s too deep,” Matt agrees.
I note the word “deep” as the right descriptor for vanity talk.
“Okay,” I say. “We’ll get like a not-deep rectangular sink kind of thing.”
Matt zips in his tape measure, which I take as agreement.
“What about the tub?” I ask. “Should we revisit having a shower, or is the tub still the plan? Does it make a difference?”
I sniff, casually.
“I don’t think it should matter too much,” Matt says. “What I’m thinking is, let’s start getting these walls up. We’ll get the bedroom framed out and let things sink in a little bit…”
We’re not just making edits on the fly. We’re building on the fly. Whatever will be, will be—and it seems we have no idea what shape this place is going to take when we’re done.
When we’re sure of where the wall between the bathroom and bedroom will go, I pull a line covered in chalk along the laser we’ve shot across the room leaving a straight layer of blue dust. Matt marks another four and a half inches off the wall on one side of the open space where the bathroom will be—and Tim does it at the other. We repeat the process in the space that will become the bedroom.
We end up with a chalk outline of where our walls will stand. The idea is that, having made our marks, we’ve effectively created a 1 : 1 scale architectural drawing. We can understand the space in two dimensions. Now we push on to a third. And I can actually see the shape of things. The concern in my stomach begins to fade.
* * *
—
Outside in the rec area, Jonathan and I set up a workstation with sawhorses I found in the garage and lay a couple of the two-by-fours on top. Matt plugs in a red circular saw and gives me a quick tutorial on how to avoid cutting off a finger.
He begins by placing the circular saw across a piece of lumber which he grips with his right hand, and bracing the guide at the tip of the saw against the wood. With his left hand, he holds the wood in place, a few inches from the round jagged blade. Matt tells me that you have to follow the guide forward as you push through the wood so that you always cut square.
“Some guys will use a speed square,” Matt smiles. “But they’re not as cool as we are.”
He gives the trigger on the saw a tug and it whirls briefly, making a small cut in the wood.
“You can make a little mark and see where your blade is,” he says, pointing to an opening in the guide where the mark is visible.
“And then just go for it…”
I’ve watched Dad do this many times. He often coupled it with the dadest of dad jokes—bending his index finger and pretending that he’d accidentally chopped it off at the joint. That bit must have received a strong reaction at least once, because he went back to it continually.
After the lesson, Matt and Tim mark out measurements for the first “plates”—long pieces of wood that are hammered into the floor to support the studs. These plates are the next step in laying out the bedroom and the bathroom.
While they do that, Jonathan and I begin to rip up the old beige carpet in the rec room, next to the workstation. Starting behind the stairs, we cut rectangular sections and then pull each one up with a few tough tugs. Beneath the carpet is a green underlay we put down when we first finished the space. Jonathan and I tear into that as well, exposing the cold grey concrete I used to play on back when we were young and the basement was unfinished. We move quickly down the side of the room where the trophies and plaques and photos from my minor hockey life used to sit on shelves and hang on the wall. The baseboard pops off as we rip up the carpet—revealing some previously unknown water damage that has browned the old drywall.
Jonathan works more quickly than I do, and I hustle to catch up to him. Soon we’re at the far corner of the basement where the TV and couch used to be. Then, when we pull up a piece of carpet beneath the little window, we uncover a thick red line on the concrete.
I’d forgotten.
Another tug reveals the rest of the rectangle Dad had carefully measured out and painted red when I was seven years old. It was my first year in organized hockey—and I’d begged him to let me play goal.
* * *
—
I remember the tryout for the select team. It was at Century Gardens, a rink in Brampton. I lay on my stomach as Dad strapped on the brown leather pads the team had provided. He made them too tight; I could barely bend my legs. Neither of us knew what we were doing. I wobbled around the ice and then settled into the net, which felt enormous behind me. Then I crouched, just as I’d seen the goalies on TV do. I kicked aside almost every shot I faced, flopping to my knees and pushing at the puck with an oversized stick. None of the kids could raise the puck off the ice, but I felt like a human wall.
I can still remember hearing his whistle. I looked up, and there was Dad in the stands with his pinky fingers in his mouth. He clapped and cheered. I smiled at him—then crouched and kicked away another shot.
It was after I’d made the select team as a goalie that Dad brought my road hockey net downstairs and laid out the crease on the basement floor. It was the best way to practise, he said. If I wanted to play hockey, I had to put in the work.
So I’d strap on my equipment and Dad would shoot tennis balls at me. We worked on my glove side and my blocker side. We ran through my butterfly save and my pad save. We perfected my angles—and my reaction time whenever he deflected a shot off the wall beside me.
We spent hours down in that basement. Dad didn’t know anything about being a goalie; he’d never had much of a chance to play the game himself. After he died, though, I found a photo tucked away at my grandmother’s house of him with a hockey team he played on as a kid. My grandfather, who was a team coach, stands at one end of the back row. I wondered why he’d never told me about that.
What Dad and I didn’t know about the game, we taught ourselves. We’d read goalie technique books, and he’d watch the weekly lessons I took with the minor hockey program. We worked on the details in the basement rink together.
Take another step out.
Stick flat.
Bend your knees.
Hold your glove higher.
As I got older, I spent years on the Brampton AA trave
l team—the one below the top-level AAA squad. I was so frustrated that I couldn’t make that top team. Once, after I played poorly in Georgetown, I threw my gear angrily in the back of Dad’s truck and slammed the door when I got in. I’d cost my team the game on a terrible goal in the third period, after letting in several before that, and was furious at myself for it. It was shame and rage balled up in one. I’d failed. I bit my lip and started to cry.
Dad pulled out of the parking lot and headed for home, not saying a thing. I could tell he was angry. His nose always flared a bit when he was pissed off. The silence had told me something was wrong, but his widening nostrils confirmed it. Then, when he finally spoke, his voice was steady and firm—which is how he spoke when he was angry. He never yelled. I have no memory of him ever raising his voice. Instead it just got slower and stronger. Deliberate. He’d measured his thoughts, taking the time to consider them, which I think is what gave them such weight. His words were so heavy that they’ve remained stuck in my mind for decades.
“If you ever do that again, you won’t play anymore.”
I looked over at him, eyes red.
“It’s a game,” he said, softly. “It’s just a game. Don’t ever let it do that to you again.”
I tried not to. He kept shooting and I kept learning. We kept driving to practices and games. He kept whistling from the stands. Each fall we’d go back to the rink for AAA tryouts, where I’d make it all the way to last cut. I’d walk out, disappointed. But we’d go down to the basement and practise all over again.
Then, one fall at the end of AAA tryouts, the coach called me into the locker room after practice and told me I’d made the team. Dad saw it on my face as I walked into the lobby, lugging my enormous equipment bag over one shoulder and my pads over the other. He smiled wide—the big Dad smile that reached the edges of his cheeks and made his eyes squint. He hugged me.
“You did it, buddy,” he said.
The weight of those words never left me either. We celebrated with a root beer from the concession stand.
* * *
—
I give the carpet another tug, ripping it up from the edge of the wall. Jonathan bats out the dust. By nine-thirty, just two hours after we started, the carpet is completely pulled up. And with a lot of its grey paint having come away with the layer of insulation, the floor looks like rough marble.
In the other room, Tim’s measuring tape cracks as he retracts it. It sounds like a wooden blade snapping against the concrete floor.
Bend your knees…
Hold your glove higher…
Another step out…
8
I’ve dreamt of Dad often since he’s been gone. It’s always in different stages of his life, usually distinguished by the amount of hair he has on his head or the colour and pattern of a shirt I must have stored away in memory from a specific time. The pink oxford he wore in the early nineties. The red plaid from that family photo in the forest in the fall.
And once a yellow polo shirt I didn’t recall. In that dream I was a kid. When we were young, children were always called down after the worship songs and before the sermons to be prayed for by the minister. Then we’d all go to the gymnasium to sing songs about Jesus, colour in pictures of David and Goliath and other Bible stories, and snack on digestive cookies and fruit punch. It would be a party. Anyway, in my dream I was standing with my sisters and mom, talking about something I wouldn’t be able to recall when I woke. But I would remember feeling Dad’s hand on my shoulder. I turned into him and gave him a hug. I stepped back and saw that he wore a yellow polo shirt. And then, still in the gym, I was grown—and we were standing close, looking at each other. My sisters and my mother couldn’t see him. They didn’t know he was there. Jai asked me who I was talking to. And Dad and I thought it was funny. We were just looking at each other, smiling and laughing—because no one else in the world knew we could.
“They wouldn’t understand,” he said.
I hugged him again. I could feel him; I could smell him. I hugged him tighter and could feel the muscles in his back. I wasn’t yet aware of its being a dream; it was real to me, until that sinking feeling started to set in. I felt that pain that hits your throat before you cry. I looked at him and he looked at me, smiling sadly—as though he knew something that I was about to learn. I was going to wake up, and he would be gone. I hugged him again and opened my eyes in the dark.
I told Mom about the dream a few days later. She was sad because she hadn’t been able to dream about him yet, and I could see in her eyes how deeply she wanted to.
I told her about the yellow shirt he wore.
She smiled.
“He wore a yellow polo shirt on our first date,” she said. He went out and bought it with his sister, my aunt. He wanted to make sure he impressed her. He wore it with jeans and beige desert boots. It worked, because she never forgot it.
Mom didn’t recall his yellow shirt as though it was just a coincidence that I’d dreamed it, nor did it seem to come as a shock. It was just a matter of fact—as though of course he’d appear in my dream wearing a shirt she remembered. She believes in God and in miracles. She believes in heaven and angels. I used to, too. Maybe that kind of belief, ingrained in your being as a young person, can never really escape you. Even after I’d grown out of faith in my mid-twenties and become self-righteous about my enlightenment, I still found myself praying whenever I was scared. I still do.
I’m not sure if I believe in heaven or angels, but I believe in the ghosts who live in our dreams.
After that first visit I tried to dream of him all the time. But I could never control when or why he’d show up. Sometimes, I think, we spent hours together. I remember fragments of what felt like long conversations in our own world. It was as if we’d figured out a way to be together, one that was possible only if I couldn’t remember it fully in the other world. I tried to write down these dreams as soon as I’d wake up, but each time I could feel the moments receding as I typed out whatever details I could recall. The memory would start to feel more and more ridiculous as the seconds passed—until, finally, lying in bed and staring at the glow of the notes on my phone, I knew he was gone again.
The few I did manage to capture read like snapshots of a memory. Dad was fixing a table for Jai, planning to cut a right angle off an end so that it would fit into an odd groove in a new apartment she was moving into. I was helping him. I picked up his Skilsaw and cut into the table with it, sawdust flying. It was the first of the two cuts that have to meet.
“I know how to use all your tools now,” I bragged to him.
Dad smiled and put his hands on top of mine, holding the saw to the table. I could feel his grip.
“You have to do it like this,” he said, pressing down.
But when I woke up, I couldn’t remember what he’d shown me.
* * *
—
A puff of sawdust hits my nose and I let out a wild sneeze. An expendable end of lumber topples to the floor. I sneeze again, followed by a few more with increasing violence. The whine of the saw whirls down. Matt turns as the blade slows.
“Better get some Reactine,” he says.
I sniff hard.
“I live my life like this,” I say, as though functioning through allergies is a sign of bravery.
A dozen two-by-fours lie in a neat pile nearby, the studs for the new bedroom walls. Now we have to piece the skeleton together, nailing the studs to the plates, which trace the floor and ceiling like the lines on Matt’s plans.
But there are a few complications to account for, Matt tells me. For one thing, a large duct runs across the left edge of the ceiling, meaning we’ll need to work out where to position the studs around it. He begins by laying a long flat two-by-four on the floor across the width of the wall—the plate, as I now know to call it. Then he lays down the laser level in the middle of the room,
lining up the red beam that shoots along the floor and up the wall—meeting the edge of the duct that hangs from the ceiling. We’ll need to place a stud that reaches from the floor to the ceiling along that mark. All the subsequent studs to the right of it will need to be cut shorter so that they reach only to the bottom of the duct, Matt says.
Seems simple enough. From the stud that lines up with the edge of the duct, we’ll place the other studs every sixteen inches to the end edge of the wall. But we need to be exact, Matt says. It’s sixteen inches—“on the centre”—no more or less. The bottom of the stud has to be right on the mark, he says.
“Why sixteen inches exactly?” I ask. “Why not a foot?”
Sometimes it is a foot, Matt explains. Sometimes it’s two feet. It depends on what the plans call for. Floor joists—the support beams in floors and ceilings—are spaced according to both the span and the material you’re using. And studs should sit directly under joists if they’re bearing weight. But our partitions aren’t bearing weight, and sixteen-inch centres are just close enough to keep the drywall nice and flat, he says. Later I do a little research and discover that the long-standing sixteen-inch rule became almost unbreakable after advances in machinery allowed for the development of plywood and drywall—which come in sheets measuring ninety-six by forty-eight inches. So whatever your centres are, they have to be a factor of ninety-six.
“On every tape measure you’ll see the feet marked off, of course, but also the sixteens—a red sixteen, thirty-two, forty-eight, and so on,” Matt explains. He points to the clearly marked red squares along the tape. “It makes it easy for carpenters.” There’s also a black diamond every three-sixteenth of an inch to help them measure out the proper distance for engineered joists, which are stronger than the usual spruce lumber and so can be spaced farther apart. That is, ninety-six divided by five rather than six.
It seems like the kind of math problem I spent my high school years daydreaming through. I don’t have a mind for numbers and this all feels embarrassingly complicated. I’d never noticed the diamonds, or the red squares, or a lot of the other things built into a tape measure. The nail holder in the end hook, for example. The fact that the end hook has a bit of play in it—the exact thickness of the hook—to ensure that you get a true reading whether you’re pushing or pulling the tape. The fact that the case has the length of the tape inside printed on the back so that you can keep the tape flat and add that number to the reading to get an accurate measurement.