by Dan Robson
The second thing she remembers is Dad running down the stairs of the townhouse and rushing to the carport to start up their blue two-door Firebird. She was waiting at the curb when he pulled up. He got out of the car and looked at her standing there. He smiled and shook his head. “What have we done?” he said.
She smiled back. “I don’t know what we’re doing,” she said.
Dad helped her into the passenger’s seat.
During the prenatal course my parents took he’d scribbled diligent notes and studied the material as if there’d be a final exam. Then, in the weeks before the due date, he’d put the finishing touches on the nursery he’d built for Jaime. He’d made a change table out of wood and a frame for a tiny bed she could sleep in when she was old enough.
That night, though, there was little he could do—and nothing either of them could control.
Mom tried to breathe slowly while her contractions increased. Dad drove quickly, nervously through those big snowflakes, on their last ride together before everything changed forever.
In the hospital he dabbed Mom’s head with a cold cloth and held her hand. He ran through the breathing exercises they’d learned. None of it was really of any use. The one thing she asked for—a larger bed, she felt claustrophobic—he had no power to provide.
There wasn’t time anyway. Three hours after they left the house, around one a.m. on January 6, their first child was born.
Dad held her first.
“She has perfect lips,” he said.
“He was overwhelmed,” my mother tells me. “He was just beaming and crying.”
Like when it rains on a sunny day.
17
It’s ten a.m. We’re just a few hours in, but it feels as if it’s been an entire day. Our pace has improved.
I’d managed to get the rhythm of the wiring down, finishing much faster than I imagined I would. The drain pipes have been laid on a meticulously measured slope, ready to be connected and tied into the main sewage system.
Now Matt rifles through a Home Depot bag, searching for something he can’t find. He forgot to pick up the couplings for the plumbing. He doesn’t seem concerned.
“Your dad probably has some in the garage,” he says.
“He probably does,” I agree. But I have no clue. I just assume he’s got at least one of everything. We all know about the stockpile of tools and hardware in the garage, but beyond what I wield around my waist, I’ve remained quiet about bringing any of it into the mix. I’m still careful to not leave any of his tools lying around to get picked up and used by someone else.
The truth is, I don’t want Matt going through my father’s stuff. I’ve been trying to avoid the very obvious reality that we have everything we need for the reno in the garage. The other day, I’d brought one of Dad’s drills downstairs to use, but lost sight of it when I set it down and it got mixed in with the general tools. After I hunted around and found it again, I’d quietly put it back in its case and taken it upstairs. It was a weird quirk, and I couldn’t admit how much it bothered me. So later, when Matt asked if they could borrow a couple of drills to help speed things along, I dutifully went upstairs to get them. Dad had printed Robson in permanent marker above the Milwaukee logo on the red case that held two of his drills. I grabbed that one. That had stressed me out enough.
Since then I’ve tried to keep tabs on who was using the drills and where they were left. When no one was around, I’d carefully place them back in their cases. I’d never experienced obsessive-compulsive disorder, but I was feeling borderline at least.
I tell Matt he can look for the couplings in the garage because there’s really nothing else for me to say. He heads upstairs with Tim, and a few minutes later they return with several copper fittings they’ve found in an old fishing tackle box.
We had enough T’s, Matt says, but we’d run out of couplings. He shakes the copper pieces in his hand like dice. “But now we’re back on track.”
He mentions that he saw a bunch of tools up there that got him excited. “Man, there’s an awesome old-school Skilsaw,” he says. “Like, a pro one. That one’s pretty sweet. I got giddy when I saw it.”
He also noticed the “amazing pro mitre saw” that Dad had recently bought—the one he’d pack in his truck and bring down to my place to help me build the shelves and the desk I work at.
I grin. “Yeah,” I say. “It’s pretty cool.” I’d only ever touched it when I helped Dad carry it from my patio to his truck.
I know the request to put tools like that to use will soon follow. There’s no doubt that it would save us a lot of time. They’re going to want to use these tools. It’s inevitable. And of course, why let them sit there, going to waste? Still, I just don’t know if I’m ready yet.
But no need to worry about that at the moment. Matt’s quickly moved on to his next task: firing up a blowtorch.
We have to solder together the junctions for the new waterlines, which means first building a makeshift workbench by balancing one of the old doors we’ve taken down atop two sawhorses.
Now Matt scatters the couplings on the surface. He takes a piece of steel wool and swirls it around inside one of these little pipe fittings, scuffing off the oxidization and exposing gleaming copper. He gives it a blow, then cleans up an inch or so at the end of the pipe. After that he takes a bit of flux—a chemical paste used to join metals—from a jar with a small brush, and spreads it around on the inside of the fitting and the edge of the pipe. I didn’t know this (not that I’d ever thought about it), but the solder won’t stick to copper on its own. It will just bead off in unsightly blobs. It certainly won’t seep into the joint.
The blowtorch hisses as Matt turns it on, and then a flame bursts out of the nozzle. It sounds like the static on the snowy channels that didn’t work on old analog televisions. He pinches the joined copper piece in a big pair of pliers and holds it over the flame, rotating it slowly as if he’s toasting a marshmallow. Grey steam rises out of both ends of the pipe.
“Once it heats up it just sucks right in there,” Matt tells me.
I find myself fixated on the flame kissing the copper. The solder disappears into the seam between fitting and metal. When it was cool it was dull and lifeless. But now, as the tip of the solder touches the hot copper, it melts like wax, seeping eagerly into the joint and glowing like mercury wherever the flux has been applied to the pipe. It’s the melting of one thing into another, forging a union. It’s like how strangers find each other—and whatever form or shape that union takes, it creates a bond that makes those two things one. Or the way a child is always connected to their parent, part of each other, for better or worse, forever. It’s incredible to watch the melding of a connection that creates something that wasn’t there before. Maybe love is just a way of melting.
“Sometimes you’ll find that it’s not sucking in,” Matt observes, breaking the spell. He’s still holding the flame to the copper matrimony, but it’s not taking. It seems destined for divorce. “The problem is likely that there wasn’t enough heat all the way around, so you need to make sure you rotate nice and slowly across the entire surface.”
The soldering takes time. We work carefully, since the smallest mistake caused by a shortcut can lead to enormous problems.
“If you forget to clean one thing, we’ll have water spraying everywhere,” Matt warns.
The plan is to cut into the current waterlines that run across the rafters above us—then slip in the new copper junction we’ve soldered. It creates a way for two new lines to tee off from the waterline for the washroom.
The meticulous nature of this process strikes me as something akin to the way my father always carried himself. If he hadn’t shown that to me through his tools, he’d certainly stressed its importance in life. Everything was built with careful execution, slow and steady. There were no shortcuts. If melting is love, effective love takes
patience and care.
* * *
—
Back in the soon-to-be-bathroom, we’ve smashed out a giant crescent- shaped hole in the floor, revealing two large “sanitary pipes,” which I learn is a nice way to say “shit pipes.” One runs parallel to the stairs and the other runs on an angle, connecting to the other pipe somewhere farther down beneath the basement floor. We need to saw into both pipes and add junctions to drain the new shower and toilet, Matt explains.
This seems a potentially disastrous idea. The massive crescent hole looks like a muddy lake—and it’s rising rapidly.
Matt goes to press his Sawzall against the pipe.
“Have we turned off the water?” I say, quietly concerned. He doesn’t hear me—but because it isn’t under pressure, nothing unsightly comes flooding out as the saw rips through it.
The new junction is supposed to slip over top of the edges of the old pipe after we’ve cut out an opening. We’ll have to slide it over one end of the opening and then shimmy the piece back, splitting the difference between the two ends and overlapping about half an inch on either side, which will be slathered in glue. It won’t take long to dry, so we need to move quickly. We’re eyeballing the length here. The initial gap isn’t big enough, so Matt uses the Sawzall to trim off a bit more of the pipe until we have enough room to manoeuvre.
The water rises around the operation at a concerning rate. There’s much more than the day before.
“We’re going to need to bail as we go,” Matt says.
I rush to the stairs to grab a few Tim Hortons cups that held our morning coffee. We each kneel around the hole, trying to scoop the water. Matt pretends to take a sip from his while Jonathan empties out a garbage can to pour the water into. We go cup by cup, which is not close to being quick enough to keep the water from swallowing the sewage pipe.
Although the four of us are working away on the junction, it’s a slow, inefficient process. I feel that everyone should be much more concerned than they seem. We try to slather the glue on the edges of the pipe, but it keeps getting washed away.
It’s soon apparent that the coffee cups are a bad idea. It feels even more ridiculous when I remember that there’s a Shop-Vac in the garage. “Will that help?” I ask.
Matt’s hands are drenched in glue and muddy water as he struggles to connect the pipes in the muck. “Yeah,” he says. “That would help.”
As expected, the yellow industrial vacuum—which of course bears the name Robson in permanent marker—works much better than the coffee cups. It sucks back the water and holds it from rising just long enough to allow us to apply the glue and screw the pipe in to fit. Still, the base of the vacuum fills quickly and I have to dump it out into the garbage pail several times before we’re finally able to get the junction glued in place.
I’m covered in the muddy water of whatever’s come up from the ground—or possibly what’s leaked out of the sewage pipe.
We move on to carry out the same process on the other side of the crescent mud lake, sawing a large chunk out of the sewage pipe that runs on an angle beside the first one so that we can add a junction for the toilet.
We have no margin for error. This time Tim works the vacuum while I stand ready with channel locks—a long blue wrench the size of my forearm—in case we’re unable to twist the junction into place and have to force it. Fortunately that particular call to battle never comes.
* * *
—
With the junctions connected, we head up to the garage to unpack the brand-new porcelain throne. We need to make sure that we place it in exactly the right spot above the drain and an inch off the wall—which means we have to factor in another half-inch from the frame to account for the drywall still to come. We’re starting to think ahead now. Getting smarter.
“You’ll go to some people’s houses and you’ll see the lid tilting forward because they put it too tight to the wall,” Matt tells us.
He measures the width of the toilet tank. “We’re at ten and five-eighths,” he announces. “So off the stud, add a half-inch for drywall—and that brings us to eleven and an eighth.”
I nod, but I don’t really understand math with fractions off the top of my head.
“Let’s add, say, an inch and three-eighths,” Matt says, holding his tape measure across the back of the toilet. “So let’s make it a nice round number of, ah, twelve and a half. That’s where the centre of our toilet drain is going to be.”
I nod again, still not knowing what he means. “All right, okay—cool,” I say coolly.
Matt is correctly unconvinced that I understand the measurements he’s talking about. I clearly have not reviewed my notes on the original lesson he gave me on how to properly read a tape measure. He extends it and explains that anyone who can properly read a tape measure is able to build a house.
“Some of the familiar marks are going to be your twelve inches, obviously—a foot—and then you have your twenty-four,” he says, pointing to each number, highlighted in black. “And you have your sixteen in red, so you know sixteen on centre,” he goes on, repeating the one lesson I learned while framing. “Other materials that are going to line up with your sixteens are your insulation and drywall.”
I nod once more, following the lesson so far. But it’s about to get more intricate. Matt holds the tape with his thumbs at the fifteen and sixteen, then moves his left thumb along on the longer marks between the numbers.
“Everything is measured in halves of halves of halves of an inch. Just keep dividing in half. Quarters, eighths, sixteenths. You’d have to be the king of finishing carpenters to measure in thirty- seconds. So, when we’re measuring, you use the largest number of the largest fraction you can. Three eighths, but not four. Five sixteenths, but not six. Because six sixteenths is three eighths, and four eighths is a half.”
It seems like a riddle.
He shows me what each of the shorter lines between the numbers indicates, pointing to each one moving across: “One eighth, two eighths—two eighths is a quarter,” he says, moving his thumb along. “Three eighths, four eighths—five eighths.”
It seems way too specific for me to ever use, but Matt insists it’s important. Any carpenter worth the name can look at something and tell you within an eighth of an inch how thick it is. And they don’t just talk in fractions of inches, they see in fractions of inches.
“Some guys will say measure that stud to the sixteenth,” Matt says. “So you’ve got to be real accurate. Once you’ve mastered the sixteenth…”
“You’re ready to build a house?”
“You’re ready to build a house. People think I’m ridiculous when I say ‘Learn to read a tape measure, you can build a house.’ They’ll be like, ‘Anyone can read a tape measure.’ Well, no.”
Not me. In construction, I’m learning, knowledge is competence. But that’s only half of it. Your hands know things your brain only suspects. No amount of theory will help you sink a nail in one swing or rip a straight line into a sheet of plywood with a Skilsaw. You can do almost any job if you understand the principles and your eye and your hand know their way around. My trouble is, I don’t have either. Not the theory, not the instinct. And the rules—the skills of the trade—it all feels like a different language to me. It’s a language I’ve had plenty of time to learn. A language I should know.
I feel both stupid and guilty for not knowing about something as simple as the markings on a tape measure. Dad gave me my first one when I was two years old. How did it take me thirty years to find out how it works?
* * *
—
There’s no time to dwell, though. We have pumping to do.
We’ve laid out the wide black tubes inside the trench in the floor. One leads to the toilet. The other to the shower.
“Now we need to think about flow,” Matt says, returning to his drainage philosophy. “Goo
d flow is essential.”
Pipes often get backed up when they’ve been installed with poor planning, taking weird turns on odd angles. I’ve never considered where the pipe beneath a toilet or shower drain leads, and how obvious the points that clog things up actually are. It’s fascinating to see the skeleton of a house—all the hidden bits you take for granted. Like a human body, you often don’t know something is wrong until it’s too late.
I look down into the drain where the new toilet would sit, and flash back to an unfortunate incident involving the washroom on our main floor that I’d caused.
I was in the basement playing video games when I saw several drops fall—and then noticed the giant wet spot pooling across the ceiling tiles. A clog, combined with a running toilet, had resulted in an overflow that flooded the downstairs bathroom and then leaked through the hardwood and into the basement. I did what any proper teenager would: I bolted upstairs to find someone else to take care of the problem. That person was Dad, of course. He was in his room, about to fall asleep, when I came bounding in with all the gory details. He quickly stopped the flooding and replaced the ruined ceiling tiles. It took days to dry out the carpet.
I’d been the last person to use the downstairs bathroom before the great flood, but I never told anyone. Its hardwood floor remained rough and darkly stained, the scars of my irresponsible flush management still visible today. It was my great shame, and I planned to take it to my grave.
The memory haunts me as I peer down the toilet hole with Matt. He’s pondering ways to ensure the optimal angle for effective release.
“I imagine if you wanted to you could put in two forty-fives here,” he says. “That might improve the flow.”
“It’s all right,” I say. “I think we’re good.”