Measuring Up
Page 25
“I don’t know,” Mom says. “But why did they do that?”
I did that.
It’s a replay of the scene at Home Depot, grilling the man who was selling us the toilet. Without Dad around, she feels that people are going to try to cut corners—or to finish them improperly. She’s a tough, smart woman. She will not be pushed around.
“Well, it’s not even right,” I say. I mean the framing—that it’s crooked and that it’s likely my fault.
Jenna interrupts: “But someone in construction can fix that.”
“Guys! Think logically here,” I say. “This is a row that goes straight across…” I’m pointing to the row before the crooked tile that finishes the job.
“So something isn’t level,” Jenna says. “If it was, it would be flush—but it’s not.”
“See, it’s low there and then it’s higher there,” Mom says. “Why is that?”
I know the answer. It’s because the bulkhead above the tile isn’t straight. Something’s wrong with the framing. Square, plumb, and level. One imperfection led to another, more obvious one. But the fix? That would require taking down the already painted bulkhead, breaking through the drywall, ripping apart the frame—and somehow building it again, this time level—that is, if the problem is even fixable at that point. Who knows where we went wrong?
“Well, let’s just ask Matt,” I offer.
“I will,” Mom says.
I brush the sweat off my forehead and run my hand through my hair three times. “Okay,” I say. “Okay—so, anyway, let me…”
But Mom has already left the bathroom. “And this wall….” she says, her voice trailing off, leaving Jenna and me behind.
“I just need to sit down,” I say. I take a seat on the toilet, in the alcove I was so proud of planning—the one that’s allowed us so much extra space.
“This is a pretty big bathroom,” I say loudly.
“It’s a great bathroom,” Jenna says. She’s leaning against the likely crooked wall with her arms crossed.
“And Dan,” Mom says from the rec room, “let me show you a couple other things.”
We walk into the open area by the stairs.
“This was only half done here, but it looks like he’s fixed that,” Mom says, pointing to the paint around the window at the ceiling where we’d passed the lumber through from the backyard. “But here—see here?” she says. “He’s got to paint here.” There’s a patched-up section at the top of the wall that needs to be painted over. She points out a few other spots on the wall that require another coat.
In the bedroom, we debate whether there should be a trim around the electrical-panel door. We don’t have one because we wanted it to blend into the wall. But Mom and Jenna think it looks sloppy. “It’s never going to fully blend in,” Jenna says. “It just doesn’t look finished.”
Matt and Rachael arrive a few minutes later. Right away, Mom asks him about the crooked finish of the tile beneath the bulkhead.
“Yeah, the framing got messed up and this end should have been slightly lower,” he says. “So we could demo that drywall and take it down…”
“It just looks obvious there,” Mom says.
“No, no, it bugs me,” Matt agrees. “It’s been bugging me.”
He looks weary. I feel for him. My family is being polite enough, but they’ve never been good at hiding what they really feel. He’s a friend, but they’re thinking of him as a contractor first. And I don’t believe they would have been happy regardless of the end product. This isn’t about the work, it’s about the absence of the only man truly capable of it in our minds.
“I don’t know what you can do about it,” Mom says to Matt—meaning, You need to do something about it.
“The only thing I can think of is putting it lower so that it gives the illusion that it’s lower,” he tells us. “Right?”
No one says anything—we have no idea what he means. He tries again, explaining that we can build up the edge with some putty so that it’ll be white—basically, filling in the gap with white instead of the dark tile.
“Yeah, pulling this off would be tricky,” he says. “Pulling the tile off would destroy it. And then we’d have to cut a new one—and then we’d pretty much have to build that up with some putty.”
I still don’t have a clue what he’s planning to do. I’m just tired—and angry that this conversation is happening.
“Anyway, think about that a little bit,” Mom says. “That sort of, it just looks…”
“Well, I’m pulling this apart, so I’ll just do that one too,” Matt says, pointing to the wall of tile he’s already stripped from above the tub. “I’ll do whatever it takes.”
He’s a sport.
“I like the toilet,” I say. “I think it looks good, man.”
“Yeah,” Mom says. “And then I just have one more…” She points to the caulking around the toilet. “Is there a reason why this is so…like in here…it’s not even?”
“Yeah, when I was dropping it we started chatting,” Matt says—meaning he was chatting with me. “And I came back to it, and it set up on me. So I gotta get a sharp blade and cut around it, and then I’ll do it again.”
“That’s okay,” Mom says. “Just so you see it.”
“What about the grout?” I ask.
Matt offers his response before Mom can critique. “The grout I’m going to redo, just because it’s so dirty. I tried cleaning it and—”
“Can you do it with grey?” Mom interrupts.
“That might be a good idea, because it gets dirty so easily.”
Rachael seems to agree with Mom and Jenna’s assessment, which adds some clout to their claims. She gives a vote of approval for light grey grout to avoid the dirty look.
Matt takes a seat on the toilet, and notes how warm the floor feels. “It’s so sweet,” he says.
Satisfied, the committee takes their leave upstairs.
* * *
—
We sweep the basement of dust and debris. The remaining paint cans, brushes, buckets, and rollers are packed together neatly in the middle of the room to give it an “almost finished” look. And we are, despite the criticisms and the final touches. The pot lights shine down on the floor and in spaces on the wall as though we’re in an empty gallery.
Little work remains, in the grand scheme of things.
When we’re done, I take off Dad’s leather belt and place it back on top of his tool bag in the laundry room. His work gloves stick out of its pockets next to the exposed, plaster-caked blade of his drywall knife. The tools are still a scattered mess of instruments that feel useless in my hands.
He’s never felt so far away.
27
Lightning brightens grey clouds and rain slides down the windshield as I steer off the highway into Brampton. It’s still raining when I park the truck in the driveway, open the garage, and walk past the mitre saw, tucked neatly away. The laundry room door creaks as I push through, past the tool bag and jackets falling off the hooks. There is a wall of heat in the hall. The air conditioning has stopped working. I’ll need to figure out how to fix it.
It’s the middle of the morning and Mom is already sad. Her eyes well as she talks about her weekend.
It’s May 30. The day we’ve dreaded.
The four of us have agreed to get together later today for the first anniversary of Dad’s death. But none of us knows what to expect. I walk down to the basement and survey our work.
The tiles have been fixed. The tiny black ones around the vanity look straight and the white floor glistens with a marble pattern, highlighted with lines of grey grout between each piece. The toilet, tucked in my alcove, looks cozy and inviting. It flushes without the confidence of a perfect slope. Hot water rushes from the shower without a leak. The bedroom covers the space that used to hold our past. T
he closet door requires a bit of a shove to close completely, but the walls looks straight—and any internal imperfections are hidden behind the freshly painted drywall. The new door frames divide the space between the bathroom, bedroom, and the large open living area. Every angle of the baseboard meets its mark. A trim has been added to the stairs. The grey laminate that covers the floor is the perfect shade, matching the rain-cloud hue of the walls highlighted by the soft glow of pot lights.
The basement renovation is officially done. It looks as new as it did the day Dad finished it the first time. We’ve even put some of the old furniture back in place: the blue leather recliner, the old brown couch, the green hutch with our childhood graffiti on it.
I stand on the stairs, looking around. We’ve created the illusion of square, plumb, and level. I’m almost proud of it. And considering where this all started, I wonder if Dad would be happy with how it ends.
Our lawn mower rumbles past the window in our backyard, pushed by our neighbour’s son. I switch off the lights and head upstairs.
We’re done here, but there’s still so much to do. The deck, for one thing, is splintered and rotting to pieces. It’ll have to wait, though.
I walk into my parents’ bedroom—my mother’s bedroom—and pull a small box from the top shelf of the closet where the Christmas presents used to hide. Dad kept all his valuables in this box: his birth certificate, his passport, and a few hundred in fifty-dollar bills. I’d stowed his wallet inside it after the funeral, to keep it safe. Now I open it up and pull out the tokens he’d tucked there for buckets of balls at the driving range. Most have expired, but one is still good.
So it’s one last bucket on Dad.
I grab a pair of his white socks, neatly folded on his shelf. Then, back in the garage, I pick up his clubs and black golf shoes, still keeping their form with his wooden shoe stretchers, and toss them in the back of the truck. The rain has passed, but the air is wet and humid.
At the range next to the farmer’s field, I pull on his socks and lace up his shoes. I carry the bucket of balls past the other golfers to the farthest spot on the grass I can find.
For his sixtieth birthday, we’d set a date for a round at Lionhead Golf Club. I’d told Dad the game was on me. I was excited to show him the ring I’d had made for Jayme. He cleared his schedule to be there.
I start with the wedges, just as he always did. The first ball shanks to the left. I work my way up the irons, slowly finding my form. The ground is soft and wet, and slices of grass jump with each swing. I save the last of the bucket for the driver. The balls hook left and right as I swing harder and harder, until finally one flies straight and true and I lose sight of it in the sky.
* * *
—
I pick up Jai at the train station a couple of hours later. She’s late. Mom and Jenna are already annoyed at her. She was giving blood and then went to counselling, she says. Fine, I guess.
“I don’t want to go to the cemetery,” she says. “I don’t want to make this day about that stuff.”
“We have to,” I say.
I’m rarely abrupt with my sisters. They are a soft spot, and I don’t like to be angry with them. But we’re doing this. It’s time.
We meet back at the house. I park the truck and we all climb into Mom’s Passat. I drive. I borrow Jenna’s big purple sunglasses because I’ve forgotten my own and now it’s bright and sunny. We don’t talk much as we drive down Mavis Road to Meadowvale Cemetery, where our grandfather’s ashes are held in a wall. As we pull in, I realize that I haven’t been back since he was put there.
We drive around the cemetery, looking at plots as though we’re looking for potential places to live. It’s a maze of headstones. There are suburban rows, side by side, and a large area for new builds—treeless stretches that are empty except for a single lonely stone in the middle of one. It feels cold and calculated.
Jai remarks that she doesn’t want to be buried at all, that she doesn’t even want a stone—she’d rather be recycled as ashes and planted with a tree—and the rest of us scoff.
“You won’t really have a choice,” Mom says.
“Well, hopefully you’ll be gone long before me,” Jai says.
And we laugh, sort of.
After about twenty minutes, we all agree that this isn’t the place where we want to bury Dad’s ashes. Too many other dead people. He wouldn’t like it here.
We go to dinner at Fanzorelli’s, an Italian restaurant in downtown Brampton. It was one of Mom and Dad’s favourite spots for date nights. On the way we drive by Memorial Arena, where Dad used to whistle from the stands—and where we’d held a small gathering for close friends and family after he died. I drop the girls off in front of the restaurant, then pull into the liquor store to pick up a six-pack of beer.
Jai orders gnocchi. Jenna, a baked pasta special, same as me. Mom, a pizza. We order two baskets of free bread. We drink a bottle of wine. We talk mostly about the food. Afterwards we drive to the Dairy Queen, where we used to go when we were kids.
On the way Mom offends Jenna somehow. It was pretty tame, but she starts to cry. Everyone is quiet. Mom says she’s sorry and feels bad, and that she’s screwing everything up.
I wait a second and then insist that Jenna tell me what kind of ice cream she wants.
“Cookie Dough and Crispy Crunch,” she says.
Jai and I go inside, and when we get back with the ice cream, Jenna and Mom are laughing.
We drive by the bungalow where Mom and Dad moved after I was born, and Jai tells the story about how Dad built the deck, and how she fell off the monkey bars waving at Grandma and Pa, and that that’s how she learned she couldn’t hold on with one hand.
“It was just a hairline fracture,” she says.
I remember Dad’s workshop in the basement of that old house. I remember sitting on a blue couch with small white polka dots, eating green peas while watching the Sharon, Lois, and Bram show on TV. I remember when Dad build the deck, too, and how I’d gotten stuck in mud that I thought was quicksand and worried I’d be sucked down.
* * *
—
When we get back to the house, we sit around the kitchen table and read the letters people wrote in green pen on graph paper at the memorial. The Robson Renovations magnets are stuck on the fridge behind us. The girls read every letter, one by one. I open one beer, and soon another. I don’t read any of the letters. I can’t.
Jenna finds a card from my old high school coach, Richard Fontanna. She gets through his name, and can’t read any more out loud. She bites her lip. Mom covers her face with her hands, pressing in, pushing back her tears.
We try to change the subject. Jai tells us about her plans to go travelling for three months—and that opens the door. It’s a stupid idea, we tell her. She gets defensive and soon we’re all arguing about a dozen different things, but nothing at all. We reach the point of near shouting, every person for themselves. Any angst we carry has been laid bare, extrapolated and expanded near the edge of words you can’t take back.
I lean sideways in my chair and look over to the right, remembering the wall. While the girls keep arguing, I get up and walk into the laundry room. I hunt through the tools for the smooth leather handle. The girls stop when I come back in with the hammer in my hand.
I remember where we left the box. They remember it too.
I take a swing. A picture hanging above crashes on the floor. A tiny crack stretches across the wall.
I step back and then take three whacks in a row—each one harder than the last. A wider line tears through the paint. I take two more swings beneath the hole I’ve started. It feels wonderful. I think of standing beside him as a kid, bashing through the wall that once stood there, the wall we took down together.
The last blow is the loudest. It shakes the wall and echoes. I bend over and try to make the hole wider b
y pulling it out with my hands. It doesn’t budge. I take four hard, angry whacks, backhanded.
“Let me try,” Mom says.
I hand her Dad’s hammer. She slams it into the wall eight times, furiously, and the drywall breaks away.
The shoebox sits on the floor inside. It’s a beige Solemate box with a blue lid held on by a piece of brown masking tape. There are two holes bashed into it from our heavy swings.
I reach down, pull the box out of the wall, and set it on the table. I take the lid off slowly, as though it’s a treasure chest. There’s a piece of white paper on top. I remember it as soon as I unfold it. My voice cracks as I read the printed words aloud.
“Saturday, June 7,” I read. “1997.”
“Ninety-seven,” Mom says. “Nineteen years ago.”
I keep going.
To whoever finds this letter. This box was placed here today to tell you a little something about the people who lived here at 26 Bates Court—or to remind us of our past when we find this box in the future. Living in this home were Rick and Sharon Robson. And their three children: Jaime 15, Danny 13, Jenna 9—as well as Brandi, the dog, and Oliver, the kitten.
At this time, Rick is in his first year of owning his own business, Paramount Design, Build and Management. Sharon is a nurse, with Saint Elizabeth Visiting Nurses. Jaime, Danny, and Jenna are all attending Brampton Christian School.
I look up at them, grinning at the next bit.
Jaime is an actress. Jenna is a horseback rider. And Danny’s a goalie with the Brampton Maroons Triple-A hockey team—and dreams of becoming an NHL goalie.
Today is the day that the Detroit Red Wings have won the Stanley Cup. Jean Chrétien is our prime minister. And Pastor Bruce Martin has just left our church, Kennedy Road Tabernacle.
We have left a few of our articles from our past in the box. We hope this has let you know a little more about our family—or has helped us remember our past a little better.