by Dan Robson
One of the two friends he arrived with tried to hit on my mom and Ronnie. They weren’t interested.
“I told him I’d rather dance with him,” she says. Mom nods across our kitchen table towards the other end of the room as though Dad is standing on the far side of a busy bar.
Dad’s rejected friend returned to let him know that the brunette was interested. But even with a sure-thing sign like that, my father still had to work up the nerve.
“It took him a while to come over and talk,” Mom says.
They didn’t dance that night. They chatted over drinks at that table near the bar while the music and smoke went on swirling around them.
“He was shy and quiet,” she says. “But I thought he was a good-looking guy. He seemed nice—I thought he was a schoolteacher.”
Before the end of the evening, with a sudden surge of dashing courage, Dad asked for Mom’s phone number. She scribbled it on a napkin and smiled and the two parted ways. Mom rumbled north on the subway beneath the street. Dad went west, driving his imbibed pals home in his Land Cruiser, the digits that would unlock the rest of his life tucked in his pocket.
It took him four days to call—so long that Mom had already assumed he wouldn’t. She suggested dinner at the Crock and Block near her apartment in Toronto. Dad told his older sister about the girl he’d met. It was the first real date of his adult life. He bought a new shirt for the occasion. The yellow polo.
“He was all nervous,” Mom says.
Beneath the glow of our kitchen light she smiles, still impressed by the effort.
“We were married two years later.”
Part IV
Blueprints
16
The alarm on my phone goes off at six-fifteen a.m., but I ignore it until quarter to seven. An early start after such a full day seems an unnecessary cruelty, but we’re way behind schedule. Matt wants to keep the project on track, and I can spend only so much time in this imaginary life before my real one falls apart.
It’s been a year now since I’ve worked at my actual job as a sportswriter—ever since a book leave turned into an extended mental and emotional departure. I’ve been back on the payroll since the New Year, but I haven’t done much to earn it. Like my relationship with Jayme, back in Toronto, my career has been out of sight and mind. I haven’t really confirmed whether these are “vacation days” or not. They’re just days when I’m here. And they’re running out.
I stumble out of bed just before Matt and Jonathan pull into the driveway in the old mint-green truck. It feels as though every muscle and bone in my body is objecting. I’m thirty-two—not young, but not old—and it’s too soon for my body to revolt like this. It feels like it’s giving up.
I’m still shaking out the sleep when I meet all three guys downstairs. It’s dark in the basement. The uneven trenches stretch across the floor like unhealed gashes. It seems like a lot of damage and not a lot of progress.
I yawn wide and loud. Matt hands me a black coffee from Tim Hortons.
“Today we wire and finish up the plumbing,” he says.
He holds a coil of white plastic wire. Matt apprenticed to be an electrician, so we’ll be paying even more attention than usual to what he has to say. It’s clear he wants to get moving—he jumps right into our instructions.
“Outlets have to be three metres apart, maximum,” he tells us. “But we’ll obviously put them a lot closer.” I’m already thinking ahead, planning where a TV will go, where dressers and bedside tables will sit.
Meanwhile, installing the outlets, it turns out, is an easy process. The electrical boxes pop into place with the tap of a hammer against the side of a stud in the desired location. Little tabs on the end wrap around the edges of the wood to hold the box in place with a screw.
I tap in six boxes. Perhaps it’s overkill, but I don’t want any outlet regrets. I put two on each side of an imaginary bed, and then one along the far wall separating the bedroom and bathroom, where the TV will go. The last one goes beneath the prospective TV screen, where it’ll be hidden by a dresser.
Matt and I unroll the white wiring to connect the boxes I’ve knocked into place.
“When you support wire, you have to support it every three feet, and twelve inches from the box,” he says.
On the top and bottom of each box is a little tab meant to feed the wire through. We pull the first wire around behind the studs and loop it up through the bottom of the first box. There’s a tiny screw that we need to loosen and clip the wire behind after several inches of it has been pulled through. Matt flips around the attachment for his screwdriver—“It’s a Robertson,” he says helpfully—and then twists the square head into place.
Now he pulls out his box cutter, twisting the knob to extend the blade.
“Then you take your knife and strip it back,” he says. “You’ve gotta get it right in between like that.” He presses the tip of the knife into the middle of the white casing around the wires. Then he pulls down, sliding the knife across the casing as it splits apart like a banana peel. The excess is cut away with the knife, leaving an orgy of naked copper wiring.
Matt offers a quick history lesson in home electrical as I watch him do it again.
“If a live wire touched the side of the box it would become live,” he says. Anyone who touched it, in other words, would be electrocuted. “So about forty years ago or something they added this wire.” He pulls back one of the three lengths of copper. “It’s tied onto the box. You stick it under this screw.” Now he twists the wire around the small screw near the bottom of the box. “You want to put it on clockwise, so that tightening the screw pulls the wire tighter,” he says, turning it.
“Now it’s grounded, so it’s safe,” he explains. “You tie the line to the panel, which connects to another ground wire, which goes directly to the ground.”
It’s one of those moments when you suddenly realize something that should have been apparent all along. “So it grounds it,” I offer. This feels terribly obvious as soon as I say it.
“Yeah, so if this touches it will trip the breaker,” Matt says, pushing the “live” wire against the side of the box. “So you’ll never have the problem of somebody getting electrocuted.”
Matt pushes the excess wiring back into the box. “You can fold those in like that, and then that’s it.”
With the next box, he shows me another veteran trick.
“Sometimes you’ll install a box and then realize, ‘Oh crap, I need to move it another foot,’ ” he says. “So you just leave a little loop, and fasten it here.” He bunches up the wire and then clips it to the stud with a plastic staple that has two small nails attached. “One to set, one to sink,” he says, giving the clip two whacks with his hammer, driving the nails into the wood.
We’ve been repeating that phrase a lot during the renovation: “One to set, one to sink.” It’s a well-known construction mantra that is used repeatedly in a YouTube video Matt’s shown me by an old-school carpenter named Larry Haun, who made instructional videos that look to be set in the mid-1980s. He’s a frail-looking old guy who’s basically a superhero of home building. Matt and Jonathan are obsessed with him, and have been showing us clips every day. Larry Haun is a throwback to what seems like a bygone masculinity. He’s skinny, but you know he can probably lift a car. He wears tank tops or works shirtless. His skin is sunbaked and worn like leather. He could probably drink you under the table but would never sully a job site with a beer. He’s a tough-son-of-a-bitch kind of man—a do-it-yourself, build-your-own-damn-house kind of man. He’s the kind of man who sets with one whack and sinks with the next. Every. Damn. Time.
But every Larry Haun had to start somewhere. I’m well on my way—spending the next hour weaving electrical wire through the bedroom walls.
“You’re going to put another box maybe three feet over,” Matt says. “And here’s a lit
tle trick. When we’re doing any interior walls we’ll have to drill a hole and run it right through the stud. But since it’s an exterior wall we’ll just bring it back behind the stud. It’s much faster.”
“So when we get to this box, what do we do?” I ask, pointing to the next electrical box that I’ve clipped into place next to where the bed will go.
Matt pulls the wire along the wall and flips it over top of the next electrical box. Then he grabs his wire cutters, cuts off the wire from the coil, and with his screwdriver pops out the top and bottom tabs. “We’re going to put in a second wire that jumps to the next receptacle,” he tells me. “And we just repeat the same operation.”
He pushes the large coil of white wire with his foot across to the next box.
“And you know what to do from here,” he says.
Maybe.
“All right,” I say. “I’ll give it a try.”
“Right on,” Matt says.
* * *
—
On the other side of the reno, we begin to lay our pipe into the long trench across the concrete, making sure we’ve got the slope right. The rule, Matt reiterates, is that there needs to be a quarter- inch decline over each foot of pipe.
Tim measures the depth of the hole closest to the big black pipe at nine and a quarter inches. Then I help him measure across the length of the trench that runs from the pipe to where the tub will sit. It’s about eight feet.
“So our rise is going to be eight times a quarter,” Matt says.
“Two inches,” Tim translates.
We need to bring the depth to seven and a quarter inches where the tub drain will sit. I measure it at just under six inches right now, so we’ll need to do some digging to get it right. Tim breaks up some ground around the trench with the sledgehammer. When we dig away the rubble we uncover another large copper pipe that appears to run across the back wall.
“That’s the main three-quarter-inch waterline,” Matt tells us. It’s a long piece that enters the house before the shut-off valve by the furnace.
It seems important.
“So—what happens if we hit that?” I ask.
“Well, if we break it, it’s a huge disaster,” he says. “Water pours out until you can get somebody to come from the city and shut it off in the street. They open up a little tiny hole and they have a pole that comes down, and they turn a valve.”
“This is just somewhere out on the street?” I ask. I’m kind of amazed at how inefficient that process sounds. And where is this hole? I’d played ball hockey and tennis-racquet baseball out there for years and never knew that something so important was beneath me. It’s a literal artery of water.
“Yeah. And it’s an emergency kind of thing. You call the city.”
“And the whole time your basement is flooding?”
“The whole time water is just pouring into your basement,” Matt avers.
“So…we avoid that.”
“Yeah,” he says. “You don’t want to hit that. What you can do, what some guys do—like kind of risky contractors, confident guys—they’ll break up all around the pipe and then they’ll cut it, and then as the water is pouring out they’ll put these fittings where you can slip them on—SharkBite fittings—and you tighten it down. They just try to do it quickly. That’s a lot of water pressure coming out of that three-quarter pipe. A large volume of water.”
“So they cut it and let the water just come out?”
“They cut and the water is pouring out. I’m sure they’d be drenched by the end of it.”
“But you’re not supposed to do that.”
“No, it’s not recommended. That’s how a cowboy does it. You’ve got to be pretty confident that everything is going to go smoothly.”
“You’ve got to be Larry Haun,” I say.
“Pretty much.”
* * *
—
Shortly after Dad met Mom, the company he worked for—Costain Construction—went under and he was out of a job.
Dad spent a couple of years getting by as a contractor while making plans to start his own company. He’d previously enrolled in architectural technology and construction management at Ryerson Polytechnical Institute, now Ryerson University. But it seemed like a waste to pay for a piece of paper to show that he could do things that he already knew how to do.
He dropped out, which was something that would become one of his biggest regrets in life. But his focus then was on starting his own business and being his own boss—the working man’s dream.
Dad’s plan was to design and build custom houses, Mom tells me. After learning the trade with Costain, he knew he could start something by himself. And he hoped to one day buy some land and build a house for his family to live in.
“Dad would have loved that,” she says.
Every fall we’d drive through the escarpment north of us, just past the farmers’ fields, our school, and the Brampton Flying Club. The trees in the hills would hang over the winding roads like a canopy of blood red and burnt orange, leaves falling like giant snowflakes, blowing in the wind. As we drove we’d gaze out the car windows, watching the colours swirl. Then we’d stop near an entrance to the Bruce Trail and hike in. Not for long, maybe five or ten minutes, just until we’d find an opening next to the trees. We three kids would jostle one another while Mom tried to settle us into a pose for a family photo. Dad would balance his Canon AE-1 camera on a rock to line up a shot. He’d press the timer and then run across the path to be with us. We’d count down from ten, readying our smiles before the flash.
Later, on the drive home, Dad would always comment on the country houses we’d pass, with acres and acres of land between them. One day, he said, he and Mom would buy land and retire somewhere up there, somewhere in the hills beneath the trees.
I believed that he would.
Dad started Robson Renovations in 1981, the summer after he and Mom married. He bought a burgundy work van, with large magnets bearing the company name that would eventually stick to our basement fridge. It was his first office. He even pulled the seats out of the back to make room for the $3270 worth of tools he’d bought to get started. That August he pencilled out a list of the items on graph paper for an insurance company. And when I found that list, folded neatly in an envelope in one of the boxes in the basement, I recognized some of the names from the tools that had been tucked away in old milk crates in the garage. The list gave a sense of purpose to what I’d known only as a tangle of unusable machinery. These were the things Dad carried as he built our life.
There was the Model 77-c Skilsaw ($300), the ½” Milwaukee hammer drill ($200), the Black and Decker screw gun ($120), the Craftsman 1½-hp router ($170), the Viking sabre saw ($100), and the Skil ⅜” rev. car speed drill ($100). Some of the other tools listed sounded pretty badass, like the propane torch kit ($65), a steel bar ($40), and a 10-lb. sledgehammer ($25), which I’d used to smash up the basement floor. Many of the other, smaller items were still in his tool bag: fourteen assorted screwdrivers ($65), a 20-oz. True Temper framing hammer ($20), a 16-oz. Estwing trim hammer ($24)—and a leather carpenter’s belt ($35), which I now wore every day.
Dad also listed a Canon AE-1 camera ($380)—the one he’d used to take those photos on our fall colour tours.
Driving around in his burgundy van with its orange and brown decals, Dad was a one-man show trying to get his company off the ground in the beginning of a recession. He’d work for days on little sleep, often going from early in the morning right through until midnight to make sure the job was done on time and done well. And he was meticulous. He had to be: one bad job could sink him. The pay was never worth the effort, but he was building equity in his reputation.
A person’s reputation is all they have to keep them going, I remember him telling me.
Mom worked constantly, too. While he was sleeping she’d be pu
lling evening or overnight shifts in the emergency room at Etobicoke General Hospital. Their young life together was a constant loop of long shifts and odd hours. It was the kind of work that could rip a couple apart. And there was certainly tension, but it was never enough to break them.
“One time I got so mad that I threw a pound of frozen hamburger at him,” Mom tells me, smiling at the memory of a fight. “He just caught it and laughed.”
Those were lean times. But Dad stayed afloat by landing a couple of big gigs in the first two years. When he was hired to turn an old house in downtown Brampton into a swanky new Italian restaurant, he ripped out the old main level and replaced it with a dining room floor, complete with a solid oak bar that he built. The reno earned him a reputation for fine craftsmanship. More jobs arrived. But it was always scattered, unsteady work.
Soon after they were married they bought a townhouse in Meadowvale, a leafy suburb west of Toronto. It was a small place in a complex called Treetops.
“It was cool and funky,” Mom says. “It was unique.” (Nostalgia may have coloured her memory. On Google Maps it looks like a pretty standard 1970s townhouse complex.)
It cost them $52,000, which they certainly didn’t have. When they bought the mortgage, interest rates in Canada were a low 12 percent. The next year they rocketed to more than 18 percent, and would soon tip over into 20 percent. Many people just couldn’t make the payments and had to sell their homes. But young and broke, Mom and Dad benefited from their blind luck. If they hadn’t locked in for several years when they did, no way could they have kept the house.
“We had no extra money,” she tells me. “We would have been in serious trouble.”
It was a bad time to start a business and a tough time to start a family. But a few months after Robson Renovations was launched, my sister Jaime was born.
The snowflakes were huge on that January night in 1982. They fell softly outside the window of their townhouse in a way that my mother would never forget. It’s the first thing she remembers about that night: the big, slow-falling snow.