by Dan Robson
It’s been a long day and I’m done talking about flow. We settle for the ninety-degree bend and hope for the best.
* * *
—
That evening I go to a Mexican restaurant downtown with a close friend, Marco. He’s been around our family since we were kids, and spent many hours sitting at our kitchen table chatting with me and my father.
He asks me how the renovation is going. “Like, what are you really learning?” he says.
“I think I’m learning how fun this all is,” I say. “And how much I wish I’d spent the time doing it beside my dad when he was here.”
In a way, I say, it also feels like he is. It’s more than just physically using his tools. It feels like he’s swinging the hammer too, guiding me. I know it’s stupid. It’s silly. Overly nostalgic and self-indulgent, and whatever else people who repress their emotions always say.
But that doesn’t change the fact of the feeling. I feel him smiling and laughing, and I feel him huffing when I screw something up. I can feel him telling me to keep going.
When the waiter brings out beers and guacamole, I realize that my eyes are red and wet. I look down, but I can’t stop now. I can feel the tears on my cheeks as I look back up at Marco. The other people in the little restaurant pretend not to notice.
It’s the first time I’ve cried in a while. The first time since we started to rip the basement apart. I was sad and I was mad then, because I knew what I was really trying to do—and I knew I’d never really accomplish it. It was impossible. I wanted to find him, but my father could only be an image in my mind now—a ghost beside me that no one else could see and that I could never fully feel. A ghost that would fade with time no matter how hard I willed my mind to make him stay. It was an incomplete connection.
I just want to see him again. To have him squeeze my hand again. And learning how to swing a hammer could never fully give me that.
“I don’t know what I’m trying to discover here,” I say. “I don’t know what I’m trying to accomplish.”
That I can hammer and screw? That I can cut some wires? Smash up concrete?
It’s more than that.
I can see how a house comes together now. I can see its bones and muscle, its veins and its heart. I can see how a home really is alive. How it holds up—and how when you cut into it, the water rises.
How it bleeds and crumbles. How it falls apart.
18
I arrived a year and a half after my sister, on a warm Sunday evening in the middle of July.
They’d barely gotten the hang of one child before a second arrived. Once again, Mom did all the work while Dad tried to stay out of the way. In the first minutes of my life, the nurse passed me to him. He held me against his chest with one arm and held my tiny hand.
Rain in the sun again.
“The perfect family,” Mom tells me he said.
It was far from perfect, though.
With a baby and a toddler to take care of, Mom took a leave from her job in the ER. They had to find a way to make life work with Dad’s scattered renovation contracts alone. But after a year of struggle—trying to juggle work and kids, trying to make enough money to pay the bills—Dad knew his dream of owning his own company wasn’t going to pan out. He had to find something more consistent and manageable or his family would starve.
A friend offered him a lead with Bramalea Limited, a company that, after its founding in 1957 as Brampton Leasing, had become one of the largest real estate developers in Canada. In the early 1970s it sought to create a new planned town—known as a satellite city—that would serve as a kind of suburban utopia. The company bought a large swath of land on the outskirts of Brampton from a local farmer who called his land Bramalea—carving the name out of the two small towns it lay between, Brampton and Malton, and adding the pleasant-sounding Old English word for meadow, “lea,” at the end. The company rebranded itself and went to work building the houses, apartment buildings, civic centres, and shopping malls that would become the suburbs of Toronto. Then, through the late 1970s and 1980s, Bramalea Limited continued to expand its reach, developing real estate across the country and throughout the United States. It was growing rapidly, with a vision for the future.
Dad took a job as a construction site manager with them in 1984.
He sold the burgundy van, replacing it with a light-blue Ford F-150 issued by Bramalea Limited, and stored away the custom-made Robson Renovations magnet signs in case he might get to use them again one day. The pay was a little more than what he could make on his own, and the hours were consistent.
With Dad home in the evenings, Mom was able to return to the ER part time, working night shifts. She’d take care of us during the day while Dad was off at a construction site. Then she’d drop us off at our grandparents’ place before she drove into Toronto for her shift. At the end of the day, when Dad was done, he’d pick us up and take us home to bed. Mom would get back sometime in the middle of the night.
It doesn’t sound like an ideal way to start life as a family, but Mom doesn’t seem to have any regrets about it. They were still young and they were moving in the right direction.
By the mid-eighties they’d saved enough to upgrade from their townhouse to an old bungalow near downtown Brampton. Dad built a workshop in the basement and a deck in the backyard. He commissioned his two-year-old son as an assistant, buying him that small silver tape measure engraved in his consistent scratch: Danny Robson, 1985. Back in a hazy, distant place in my mind, I can still see him cutting the boards and hammering them into place while I try to help him measure.
* * *
—
Those years on Norval Crescent formed my earliest memories.
I nearly choked to death on an orange slice, and Mom had to give me the Heimlich. Dad held Jai and me as we said goodbye to Mom before she left for a night shift, and we both wriggled free and fell hard to the ground. I learned to bike without training wheels on the street in front of the house, with Dad holding me steady and pushing me from behind. I can remember the rush when he let go and I went soaring down Norval for the first time without him. And the pebble-marked scrape down my leg when I lost control and crashed.
There were the stories during evening baths and as they tucked us into beds Dad had built in his workshop. Tales of the Berenstain Bears. A Fish Out of Water, Mud Puddle, and The Paper Bag Princess. There were prayers for everyone and anything we knew of in our young lives. “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep. God bless: Mommy, Daddy, Jaime, Danny, Grandma, Grandpa, Auntie B, Uncle Larry…” There was Raffi at Christmastime and “Old toy trains, little toy tracks”—and the patter of reindeer on the roof. There was the soft strum of Dad playing his guitar as he sang about snow falling on Douglas Mountain while we fell asleep. There was a panicked rush to the doctor after Jaime fed me half a bottle of Flintstone vitamins. The chill as we learned how to skate under the arched wooden roof at Brampton Memorial Arena, and the smell when Jaime threw up in her helmet.
There was the day when Mom left us in the Toyota Corolla in the driveway while she grabbed something from the house and we managed to push the gear to neutral and rolled backwards across the street, over the curb, and onto the neighbour’s lawn.
With no sense of time there was no concept of an ending—just the long stretch of childhood that seems a lifetime in itself.
Mom almost didn’t make it into the hospital when my little sister was born in early January 1988. At seven a.m. they’d sat in the parking lot of Etobicoke General, Mom refusing to budge: she knew the overnight nurses were getting off their shift and she didn’t want to be that person who strolls in to give birth right when they were about to leave. She finally relented and they went inside a little after seven-thirty. Dad had just made it back from filling out the paperwork when Jenna showed up.
My aunt brought Jaime, who’d just tur
ned six, and me, four and a half, to the hospital to meet our baby sister. She pointed at her in her crib through the glass. Jenna was a tiny ball with chubby cheeks, wrapped in pink. I was unimpressed.
“I’d rather have a puppy,” I said.
* * *
—
And then we were five.
We moved from the bungalow to our house on Bates Court shortly after Jenna was born.
Our parents had hunted for months for the right place to raise three kids, but nothing fit until they saw the house on a cul-de-sac on the western edge of Brampton. Twenty-Six Bates was a two-storey brick four-bedroom with a slightly pink hue. It had a brown roof, a two-car garage, a bay window into the living room between two evergreen trees. It had space and room to grow—a garage for tools, an unfinished basement to renovate. It had a decent-sized backyard where Dad could build a deck big enough to host barbecues by a pool, if they could save enough to afford it. Our parents could see our life unfolding there. At $200,000 it was beyond their budget—more than double the price of their bungalow—but it was perfect. They’d managed this far; they could get through the rest.
I remember the day we moved in. I stood on the lawn and watched the movers unload their massive truck. Our names were taped to the bedroom doors our parents had chosen for us—I felt proud to have a space to call my own for the first time. Still, the house was bare and bland. The carpets were beige, the kitchen tiles had a faint yellow pattern, the backyard was just a long stretch of grass with some grey patio stones. And the basement was dark and empty—like a cold, concrete dungeon. I was afraid to be down there alone.
The house was a stranger to us then.
We didn’t know which part of the floor creaked when you tried to sneak out of your room. We didn’t know which vents allowed birds to nest. Or the best way to get on the roof whenever a tennis ball got stuck in the eavestrough. We didn’t know that the dining room off the kitchen was the best place to call a crush without anyone hearing. That the kids’ shower had the best water pressure. Or that the best spot to sit on Christmas Eve was just to the right of the crackling fire, and the best place to find hidden gifts was at the top of Mom and Dad’s closet. We didn’t know that the breeze coming in from the farmer’s field just beyond the rows of houses to the west would land perfectly in our backyard on warm summer nights. Or that the sewer grates on the court resembled the bases on a diamond, that a throw against the top of the bay window would result in the perfect shallow fly ball for a diving catch, or that the streetlight at the end of the driveway offered just enough glow to score one more Stanley Cup winner before bed.
The house formed around us. It became us. And the creaks in the floor, the heat in the fire, the concrete chill of the unfinished basement, the backyard breeze on a summer night—they belonged to us. They were ours, just like Michael Jackson’s Thriller on the CD player at Halloween and Douglas Mountain and Dad’s soft voice on dark winter nights. We carved our stories into the walls. A stranger couldn’t read them, but we could. We knew they were there. In the pen marks climbing farther up each year on the edge of my closet, in the garage where Dad wrote his name near the door in large white letters, in the pocked eavestrough, in the cracked and water-stained hardwood of the downstairs bathroom. In the young trees that we planted in the backyard and that grew with us, rising beyond the roof.
But back then, on the day we arrived, I didn’t know any of this. I sat on the bed in a room marked Danny and wondered if we’d like it here.
At the time, Dad had excelled as a site manager at Bramalea Limited and was quickly promoted. The company went on a spending spree in the late 1980s, picking up swaths of vacant land it planned to develop—spending more than $1.5 billion to purchase property just as the market started to peak. It was a frantic, booming time. Dad would be out of the house before six some mornings, managing the construction sites of several residential apartment buildings and subdivisions at once.
Mom took care of our hectic mornings a couple of hours later, Jaime and I darting through the neighbour’s backyard to make it to the end of the court as the bus arrived. We’d still be pulling the burgundy sweaters of our school uniform over our heads as we ran. Jenna, meanwhile, would always be there on time, prompt and waiting. Sometimes we’d miss it altogether, Jaime and I, and Mom would rush us into the back of her ancient blue Toyota Corolla hoping we’d luck out at the train crossing on Chinguacousy Road.
“Go! Go!” Mom would yell—I swear, in a housecoat with rollers in her hair—as the two of us charged out of the tiny four-door sedan like an elite military team on a life-or-death mission. Our bus driver, a charming faux-grump named Mr. Prankard, would see us in the side mirror darting up the side of the road, past whatever cars lined up ahead of us, and pull open the bus door for us to swing in just as the tail of the train passed and the bells and lights stopped ringing and flashing as the safety arm rose. (We were just up the tracks from where Dad, Bill Plunkett, and the gang blew up signals and dodged trains.) Mr. Prankard would smirk and say something sarcastic about the Robsons always being late. And Jenna would grin victoriously, a couple teeth missing, from one of the seats near the front where the young kids sat. It seemed to happen almost daily.
By now Mom had a part-time job with Saint Elizabeth Visiting Nurses, a home health care company. It had meant giving up the adrenalin rush that came with treating victims of gunshots and motorcycle accidents for cranky patients who needed to pee out of a tube. Whatever had been lost in excitement, though, was made up for in the mornings and evenings she could now spend at home.
Mom would travel around with a bag of needles and catheters in the trunk of her car, coffee splashing out of her cup as she navigated the streets of Toronto’s western suburbs using a well-worn road atlas. It was always a long day, filled with complaints from overstressed families dealing with seriously ill loved ones. In some cases these patients had come home to die. It was Mom’s job to make sure they had the dignity of peeing through a properly inserted tube or that they remained hydrated with an insulin drip.
Every night after school we’d hear the garage open and the squeak of the laundry room door—and then Dad’s voice calling, “Family, I’m home…” He’d smell like sawdust and grass after it rains.
And then it was dinner, a story, a prayer, then bed. I’d dream through the night until that distant but familiar beep. Until the creak of my father’s feet on the floor and the rush of falling water. Until he’d peek through our doors, just to be certain.
“What have we done?” he asked her that January night under those thick, soft snowflakes.
“I don’t know what we’re doing.”
But each new day they’d do it all again.
19
Matt examines the thin copper waterlines that run across the ceiling rafters above the bathroom. Then he holds up one of the fittings we’ve soldered together and lines it up with the pipes. We’ll cut through the pipes and slide the new fittings into the gap, tapping in off the mainline to bring water to the bathroom. He points at another thin pipe that runs directly beside the hot and cold waterlines.
“We just have to be careful of this gas line here,” he says.
I stand up on the edge of my toes to get a look. “That we don’t hit it?”
“Yeah,” Matt says. “So we don’t blow the house up.”
There’s a long pause.
“How would we hit it?”
“There’d have to be a gas leak—and then we’d put the torch on it,” he says. “And boom.” Matt mimics an explosion with his hands, and lets the thought sit there for a moment. “We’ll have to turn off the water and drain all the lines,” he tells me. “And then we’re off to the races.”
The main shut-off for the water is on the other side of the new bathroom, beside the water heater. There’s a meter near the wall, connected to the heater. I’ve never noticed it before.
“On the c
ity side of the water meter, you’ve got your shut-off,” Matt says. It’s another small copper pipe that comes up out of the basement floor, running into the meter gauge gizmo. There’s a little knob to twist, on and off.
Before this moment I had no idea where it was. If we’d had a leak or a flood, I wouldn’t know how to make the water stop. I don’t mention that fact. It’s embarrassing. So I pretend that I knew all along.
Matt points to a wire that runs across the ceiling to the electrical panel and then down, entering the floor next to the main waterline. It’s a ground for the house, he says. It ensures that any excess current will want to move to that point and find ground, for safety.
We shut off the water and then check the valve on the hot water tank, which is also pressurized. We have to open up the taps to let the water drain out. If the taps are closed there’s a vacuum in the system, like a giant hypodermic needle. When you open the taps the air flows in and gravity pulls the water down. Something else I didn’t know.
We use the Sawzall to cut open the hot-water line in the rafters above the bathroom.
I push over a bucket to let the warm water drip after the cut.
If we hadn’t opened the taps there’d still be water left over in the pipe—and it would start to trickle down and cool the pipe so much that the solder wouldn’t melt.
As the warm water bleeds out, we move over and take the saw to the cold-water pipe.
“You have to start the cut on the opposite side of where you’re standing, and pull towards you,” Matt says. “If you start on the side you’re standing on you’ll get a bunch of water right in the face.”
“You cut towards yourself?” I say. Doesn’t seem safe. Dad always said to cut away.
“Yeah,” Matt says. “But it’s better than getting splashed in the face.”
We connect the drain piping to the tub and the T-junction that breaks off towards the sink. We have to fiddle with it to make it happen, taking about half an inch off to make it fit before soldering it in place.