sentence, if you’re keeping track.
That week, I started coming by his workshop after my office job.
I told myself it was to help with the paperwork.
The truth is, I’d been sitting in a beige cubicle for six years doing work no one could point at, and my grandpa’s workshop smelled like sawdust and coffee and things that exist.
Tuesday, he taught me to true a board.
Wednesday, I sanded a tabletop until my arms shook and I was grinning like an idiot.
Thursday, Margaret Whitmore came about her library shelves, drank tea among the wood shavings, and told me a story I’d never heard.
“Nineteen years ago, my Charles was in the county hospital for eleven weeks,” she said.
“When they finally sent him home, he couldn’t manage the stairs.
Your grandfather showed up the next morning — nobody called him, mind you — and built the most beautiful oak
