I lifted the heavy wooden toolbox onto the dining table and laid my hand flat on the lid. It was oak, built by Jim in 1976, with brass corners and a leather handle worn smooth by his palm. Kim stood up from her chair and came around the table to stand beside me. “Mama,” she said gently, “we do not have to do this tonight.” “Yes, we do,” I said. “Your brother is waiting.” I opened the lid. Inside, on a folded flannel shirt that still smelled faintly of cedar shavings, lay a plain brown envelope, a small carved wooden bird, and a half finished piece of oak, shaped like the rocker of a chair. Mike drew a long breath. Steve, across the table, did not move.
I took the carved bird and set it on the tablecloth. “Your father made this for me the year we married,” I said. “He told me it was a wren, because wrens build their homes in unlikely places.” I turned to the envelope. “He left something else, and I did not find it until October. It was under the tray, in the bottom of the box, where he used to keep his best chisels.” I slid out a sheet of paper in his careful square hand. “Barbara, if Steve ever asks you to sign something, read it first. Not because he is bad. Because he is easily led by the wrong idea of what a man owes himself. Love, Jim. P.S. The oak is for the chair.”
Steve flushed from his collar to his hairline. He is forty eight years old, with the broad shoulders of Jim and my stubborn mouth, and he looked in that moment like a boy who has been caught in a lie by a dead man. “Mom, Dad did not know what he was talking about,” he said stiffly. “I was trying to help. The reverse mortgage was an opportunity. We could have used that equity.” “For whom?” said Mike quietly. “For a boat on Smith Mountain Lake? For a deck?” Steve opened his mouth and shut it. Kim reached out and took her brother hand across the table. “Steve,” she said. “Please. Just tell us.”
A wooden toolbox opened at a family dinner held a message from a husband who had known what his son would one day do.
I took a large manila envelope from the bottom of the toolbox and put it in front of my son. “I was at the courthouse in Roanoke on Tuesday,” I said. “With Mr. Delaney, who is a very good lawyer. The reverse mortgage was recorded with my signature, and the bank, once it saw the dates, discovered that I was at the house of my sister in Charlottesville when the paper was notarized. They have declared it void. They are very sorry. Their own investigator will be contacting you, Steve.” I let the sentence sit. “I did not call the police. I called a lawyer. They are different things, and I want you to know that.”
Steve slumped. For a time he said nothing, and the only sound was the old pendulum clock on the sideboard, which Jim had restored in the winter of 2004. At last he said, hoarsely, “I owe the bank two hundred and eight thousand dollars. I owe the credit union another sixty. I have a mortgage of my own. I did not think I would be caught. I thought the money of Dad would take care of it.” “The money of Dad,” I said. “Your father worked for forty five years in a shed, Steve. He did not leave it for a boat.” Steve began to weep, silently, with his shoulders shaking. Kim moved her chair next to his and put her arm around him.
I told Mike and Kim what I wanted to do. They agreed, and then we told Steve. He would sell the boat and the lake property. He would meet with the lawyer and sign an agreement to repay the bank over time, using the proceeds, and I would add the difference from the sale of the factory. I had received six million, one hundred thousand dollars in June, and Jim would have wanted his son to start over, not to sink. In return, Steve would attend counseling for six months with a Dr. Prather in Salem, and he would stop handling any money for anyone in the family, for good. “Do you agree?” I asked.
“I agree,” he whispered. I reached across the table and took the piece of oak from the toolbox, the half finished rocker that Jim had been shaping the week he died, and I pushed it gently across the table. “Then you can start by finishing this,” I said. “Your father could not. I thought you might want to.” Steve took it in both hands. He turned it over, running his thumb along the grain, the small cuts of the chisel, the pencil marks, where the line stopped. Then he wiped his eyes on his sleeve and said, “Mom, I do not know how to make a chair.” “Neither did he,” I said, “at first.”
Steve moved into the shed behind my house that fall. In the afternoons, after his job at the hardware store, he sanded and carved and swore under his breath in the cold. By January he had finished the rockers and the legs and had begun on the seat, and the shed smelled of oak shavings, as it did when his father was alive.
The chair was finished in April. It is a plain rocker, honest, with a high back and a broad seat, and the pieces fit together so snugly that there is not a nail in it. Steve carved a small wren into the top rail, and under it, in tiny letters, he had cut two words. For Mom. He carried it to the front porch one morning, with the dew still on the grass, and set it facing the mountains. “It is not as good as Dad made,” he said, shyly. I sat down in it, and it rocked once, and settled. “It is better,” I said. “Because you made it.”
At the dedication of the Jim Furniture Scholarship at the community college, which I founded with the sale of the factory, Steve stood beside me in a pressed shirt and shook hands with thirty students. A boy of nineteen said, “Sir, is it true that your father built all these chairs?” Steve smiled. “Yes,” he said. “And I built one.” I took his arm, and we walked out into the spring sunshine, and the dogwoods were in bloom on the lawn. I thought of the wren, building her home in an unlikely place, and I held the arm of my son a little tighter.
