Measuring Up

by Dan Robson

  Later, Matt gives us a crimping tutorial. He slides a small ring—the crimp—over the end of the pipe so that it covers the two lines engraved on the skinny end of the pipe junction. Then he uses a tool called the “crimper” that looks like a giant pair of pliers, but with differently sized crescents where the ends meet. They close around the Pex tube and crimp. He pulls the handles tight, and with some difficulty, before it closes fully with a snapping sound.

  He holds up the white tube now attached to the copper fixture. “It’s a lot easier than soldering it,” Matt says. “And you’ve got your water tank line.”

  In the bathroom, we stretch a coil of Pex tubing from the new junction over to the hole where the toilet will sit. Matt holds the line where it will run down the wall that isn’t yet there.

  “You have to be careful with Pex because you only have so much room to be able to make that crimp. If you trap yourself—if you put it through and then decide you want to crimp something inside the joist base—it gets tricky,” he says. “There are crimping tools that go in a joist base, but I don’t have that. So we’ll just be smart.”

  He calls for the biggest auger bit we have—about the width of my index and middle fingers—and connects it to my father’s drill to bore a hole through the plate around the toilet. A long piece of Pex is pushed through the hole, sticking out the top. We add an elbow and snap it onto another piece, which allows the waterline to run horizontally through the joists and then down the wall.

  Jonathan is the tallest among us, so we have him do the work up high. The rest of us stand around the toilet hole and watch him.

  “He’s the crimping man,” Matt says.

  Jonathan tightens the crimper around the new connection point. “The Bloods and the Crimps,” he says in a tough guy voice.

  “The Bloods and the Crimps,” Matt repeats.

  Tim shakes his head, disappointed in us. “I knew someone was going to make that joke,” he says.

  Jonathan clips the crimper, pinching the connection in place with impressive speed.

  “Nice crimp,” I say.

  “Good crimp, good crimp,” he agrees. “Very tight crimp.”

  “Water tight,” I say.

  “Water tight,” Jonathan offers.

  “Water tight,” says Matt.

  We are men at work and this is our worksite banter. It’s silly in a truly unfunny way, but deep in the basement it is proper comedy. The days spent working side by side have forged a connection that is unique to us. We make jokes about Larry Haun, the king of contractors. We find terrible puns hilarious. We repeat each other’s words with exaggerated inflections, just because—like the guys in that old “Whassup” Budweiser commercial. It’s odd, juvenile behaviour. But it’s the language we speak after spending hours, exhausted and dirty, cutting through sewage pipes and drilling into the damp dirt beneath us. We are building something, together—and the shared work creates a unique kind of union.

  Water tight.

  Water tight.

  We go through the process a few more times, setting up waterlines to reach the vanity and shower. Both hot and cold lines are connected where the tub will sit, the cold-water line with a connection that extends over to the link we just set up with the toilet. Another connection brings the waterlines down to where the sink will sit on the other wall. A web of Pex tubing brings it all together through the joists and studs. We just need to tie into the hot and cold mainlines we cut through earlier, using the two T connections we’ve soldered together.

  Matt takes the blowtorch to the cold-water mainline pipe to make sure there’s no moisture inside.

  He’s dangerously close to the gas line, just above it.

  I take a few steps back and bump into Tim.

  “It won’t matter,” Tim says. “If he hits that, the whole place goes up. If you’re on the second floor you’re still going to feel it.”

  I wait on the stairs around the corner until Matt switches off the blowtorch.

  Soon we’re connecting the waterlines to the tub that Tim and I have carried in from the garage and set in place. We set up a laser level to shoot a line up the middle of the tub, lining up where the faucet and handles will go.

  When everything is tied in and connected, we turn the water back on to test it out. Water sprays out of one side of one of the connections in the joists above the tub. We forgot to crimp it. Jonathan reaches up—and pulls the tubing apart. Now water is gushing everywhere.

  “Leave it in!” Matt shouts.

  Jonathan manages to reconnect it. I hand him the crimper and he snaps the connection in place. Crisis averted, but we’re soaked.

  “That always happens,” Matt sighs. “You miss one crimp.”

  Crimping ain’t easy, but even we can’t bring ourselves to say it.

  The waterlines are connected. The plumbing and electrical work is almost complete.

  “And that’s it,” Matt says. “Throw up some drywall and Bob’s your uncle.”

  * * *

  —

  By six that evening we’re still hard at work finishing up small bits that need to get done. We build a wooden frame around the electrical panel, which is still a mess of wires and dormant wifi routers. We fill in the space between the studs with pink insulation, so the new bedroom walls—held together by half-sunken nails sticking out at crooked angles—look as if they’re packed with cotton candy. We cover the insulation with plastic sheeting and staple it into place. I discover that the sheeting is called “poly.”

  Tim pours bags of gravel over the plumbing we’ve connected in the holes we blasted out of the floor while Jonathan smoothes it over with a shovel, so we can cover it with concrete.

  I walk out to the side of the house where Dad left his old green wheelbarrow and the long ladder we used to hang Christmas lights and retrieve tennis balls from the eavestrough. The wheelbarrow wobbles on its single wheel as I try to steer it over the grass, through the gate, and around to the front door. Once I’ve manoeuvred it downstairs, banging it into a couple of walls along the way, we fill it with concrete mix and water. Matt mulches it with a shovel until it becomes a thick grey mud. Finally we heave globs of the wet concrete over the gravel and use a trowel to smooth it out.

  The day doesn’t end until half past eight with final touches to the concrete, which we leave to dry overnight.

  * * *

  —

  On my father’s desk there is a cream-coloured pamphlet bearing a blueprint sketch overlaid by a green triangle, the name Paramount Design, Build & Management printed beneath it. I’ve stared at it for months. We must have workshopped dozens of names before the family landed on that one.

  I remember we had swimming lessons scheduled the day he lost his job at Bramalea Limited. Mom and Dad sat us down at the kitchen table to tell us. It felt oddly formal. Dad explained that the company had gone bankrupt, and that it meant he no longer worked for them. He didn’t sound concerned when he said it, but he must have been. After all, only serious news, like our grandfather’s death, required a family meeting at the kitchen table.

  “Everything is going to be okay,” he said, anyway.

  So we did the only thing we could: we believed him.

  With time you learn that when a parent goes out of their way to tell you everything is going to be okay, there’s a good chance it won’t. But as a kid you nod your head and maybe give them a hug. Then you pack your bathing suit and towel and they drive you to the YMCA to watch while you learn how to tread water.

  Only once did I ever see fear in my father’s eyes. He was lying on a sheet of ice on a cold winter night, gasping for air. Christmas lights sparkled in the trees and music was playing as people drifted around the oval rink at Gage Park across from Brampton’s City Hall. Dad had been skating backwards with me when he hit a divot in the ice and landed hard on his back. I remember falling to my kn
ees on the ice beside him as he tried to breathe. I didn’t know what to do. No one stopped to help us. They just glided by, moving with the music. I asked if he was okay, but he couldn’t speak. His wide eyes locked on mine. I’ll never forget them. I’d never seen them look that way before. I thought he was dying—and worse, I knew he did too.

  “Dad?”

  He grabbed my hand.

  “Dad?”

  He squeezed. It felt like minutes. I cried. Finally he gasped as though he’d found the surface of the sea. Then he lay on the ice, breathing deep and slow, our eyes still locked and his hand in mine.

  “I’m okay,” he said at last. “It’s okay, buddy.”

  We slowly got up together—and then pushed off on another lap as if nothing had happened. Fathers aren’t supposed to show fear, and he took his back as quickly as the breath had left his lungs. I’m not sure why that’s the rule, but I know that a child never forgets the look of terror when they see it on a parent’s face. They’re the barometer of security, and it’s impossible to forget the moment that our true vulnerability is exposed.

  It was a flash, but it lingered in my mind. Dad never spoke about it, and I never brought it up. He never let me see his fear again. I still don’t know if that was a strength or a weakness.

  In the months following the collapse of Bramalea Limited, Dad set out to start his own company for a second time. What did it take to jump into that uncertainty without showing fear? He must have been stressed or anxious. He must have thought about what could happen if it all fell apart.

  But if he did, we never saw it.

  * * *

  —

  We still went to the private Christian school on the edge of Caledon, just beneath the flying club, which we’d attended our entire lives. It was run by Kennedy Road Tabernacle, the Pentecostal church my parents were married in and where we went every Sunday. Neither of them had really practised faith—aside from attending church as kids—before going to the occasional service and deciding the purple- carpeted rotunda was where they wanted to get married. Neither had been particularly religious before, but the church offered community, structure, and purpose. It became central to our social lives—and a framework through which I understood the world.

  Kennedy Road Tabernacle Christian School was built in the late 1970s as part of an effort to promote conservative Christian education. Jai and I went there as soon as we reached kindergarten. We wore burgundy and grey uniforms and recited the Lord’s Prayer, read out over the intercom every morning, before singing the national anthem. It was a small school, with only a few hundred students. The walls were lined with fuzzy grey carpet, and if you brushed against it you’d often get pricked by pins left over from work that had been displayed. For the first several years the gymnasium floor was covered in a green carpet that caused terrible rug burn anytime you fell playing hockey with a Wiffle ball or during “Indian tag,” a capture-the-flag game that I now understand was quite racist.

  Dad helped build the playground and the small wooden bridge that crossed a ditch just beyond the paved blacktop out back. In warm months, through elementary school, the boys in each grade played a blend of soccer, football, and rugby that had essentially one rule: a point was scored by getting whatever kind of ball we had between the baseball caps set up to make a goal line. The pitting of grade against grade created a tribal competitiveness that spilled across a battlefield left strewn with bloodied noses, gory scratches, bruised bodies, and ripped uniforms. These brutal conflicts, waged during our half-hour recesses, were banned several times—only to re-emerge as more civilized games of soccer or touch football inevitably regressed to their natural schoolyard state.

  In the age of barbarians, the wars lasted seasons. Winters brought a different kind of combat. With the wind ripping across the open acres, biting into any inch of exposed flesh, we’d build forts, digging into the drifts that rose where the schoolyard pushed up against the farmer’s field beyond us. Snowballs were amassed, stored for sieges or in defence against other classes that came looking to smash our strongholds. Behind the middle-school portables, a range of plowed snow mounds would pit every boy for himself in King of the Castle epics. Alliances broke as the peak neared. A best friend could send you crashing down the snow mountain onto the icy pavement.

  Recess was survival. The best kind of education.

  * * *

  —

  It was from that playground that I watched the framework of the school’s new wing form into the building that would house my adolescence. Managing its construction was my father’s first gig for his own new company.

  In his office at home are hundreds of photos from that year when he built the school. The blueprints, corners withered and brown, are still in the closet. Boxes of invoices, project plans, and contracts tell the story of his decade-long journey developing that little construction company—until it was bought by an expanding engineering firm that eventually grew into a global company called EXP. It was there that Dad turned the leap of faith in himself into ownership shares and a regional management role running construction projects. He was one of the only senior employees without an engineering degree—let alone not having a degree at all.

  That EXP office is around the corner from the warehouse where I pick up the new flooring that my mom and sisters have decided on for the basement. I don’t drive by to see the tree his colleagues planted there to remember him. I’m worried that its frail roots didn’t survive the winter, that the tree is already dead. I’d rather imagine it thriving than to know for sure.

  I fill the bed of Dad’s truck with stacks of grey laminate and close the gate. It’s starting to rain, so I have to rush home.

  Given the extra hours we spent on the plumbing yesterday, we agreed on a late start this morning. We’ve earned the rest, though I don’t imagine that real handymen go in for this kind of lethargy.

  Today we put up walls.

  I’m tasked with cutting out the space for the electrical box as we put up sheets of drywall. We want to have a bit of a gap between the pieces, Matt says. We measure out the distance to the electrical box, already attached to the frame, from the floor. There’ll be a small gap between the floor and the drywall when it’s put up, meaning I need to subtract a quarter-inch when measuring from the bottom of the sheet.

  The electrical box sits fourteen and a half inches from the edge of the drywall, so I have to measure that across the sheet and mark the centre of the box. Then, from the floor up, I measure fifteen inches—and the resulting point of intersection is where the electrical box will sit. The depth of the box is three inches. So I draw the box’s outline onto the drywall, adding a quarter of an inch around it as a margin for error. While measuring this out, I notice a marking on the back of the drywall sheet that reads “Aligns with sixteen-inch stud spacing”—which reminds me of the sixteen inches marked in red on my measuring tape. Carpentry’s secrets revealed.

  As I consider the prospect of being able to build my own house one day, I fiddle with what looks like a serrated hunting knife with a wooden handle. I found it in Dad’s tool bag.

  “It’s a drywall knife,” Matt informs me.

  First things first. I need to use it to carve out the holes for the electrical outlets.

  “Just take your time,” Matt says.

  He knows I’m likely to botch this. I grip the knife with Dad’s work gloves and saw into the drywall. It’s not pretty. Not being able to draw a straight line means I’m also unlikely to saw one. The expected rectangle comes out more like a narrow octagon with uneven sides. It’s reminiscent of the felt snowman I’d made in grade four—one that was unintentionally derivative of Picasso, and that Jai hangs on our family Christmas tree every year next to her own perfectly round and proportional snowman.

  “That’ll do,” Matt says, surveying my art.

  * * *

  —

  Matt
has hammered the pot light into place along the joists above us, taking special pride in the strategic layout he’s come up with in the bathroom. He fastens the last fixture in place, tilting its head to demonstrate how it can be adjusted in any direction.

  “So you can highlight the throne,” he says, aiming it towards the toilet.

  Another bit for our reno-humour comedy tour.

  We operate by the glow of the one lit bulb in Dad’s work light and a sunbeam that streaks down from the window. The hole we carved into the ground to lay the piping is now sealed by a scar of dark concrete.

  All conveniences are considered before we entomb our frame with drywall. I suggest putting a nailer in place to add extra support for hanging a television in the bedroom—and adding an extra electrical outlet above it so that its wires can be hidden. I’m quite proud of the suggestion.

  The pot lights are linked up and finished. We flick the switches and they all work. We’re making progress now. Jonathan and Tim affix the drywall sheets to the frame at one end of the bedroom as Matt and I start at the other, the four of us listening to an old Bob Dylan playlist as we go. We work quietly, efficiently—each in our own minds, but moving in symmetry.

  I cut the drywall to encase a bulkhead in the bedroom. It’s even worse than my butchered electrical box opening. The edge of the long narrow strip extending down from the ceiling is a wavy, sloping line. It’s dreadful. Dad would never settle for this. I remember him once commenting on my lack of fine motor skills. Back when I was a teenager, I’d tried to help him with something—I can’t recall what—and he’d noted that although I had no problem stopping a puck or shooting a basket, I couldn’t seem to master the intricate movements required to use a saw or hammer. I don’t think he meant to hurt me; it was a compliment: I was good at things he couldn’t do at the cost of the things he could. But it felt more like an indictment. I just don’t have the talent that a handyman requires.