A work of fiction that speaks to the complications in communication between parents and their children as time carries on…
by: Sean MacKendrick
Paula stood at the kitchen sink washing dishes as Stephen walked into his childhood home. At least, that’s what she was pretending to do. Each dish received an arbitrary number of swipes with a washcloth and a quick splash under the roaring faucet before she dropped it into the drying rack, still dripping with watery foam.
“Mom?” Stephen said carefully, not wanting to startle her in case she hadn’t heard him enter. She jumped anyway, dropping a bowl into the sink with a clatter.
“Good,” she said, picking up the bowl again and dunking it back into the water for another pass. Water soaked the front of her shirt and pants. “Maybe you can talk to him.” She jammed the bowl into the rack and picked up a glass.
It wasn’t like Paula, Stephen’s frugal and environmentally minded mother, to leave water running when she cleaned dishes. Over the whoosh of wasted water, faint sounds were just audible from the workshop, the room that had been a garage at one point in time before his father’s tools and equipment declared permanent residency. If the space had ever been used for cars, it was during a time before Stephen could remember.
He considered giving Paula a hug, as out of character as that would have been for the both of them. It just seemed like the right thing to do. Instead he gave her a reassuring pat on the arm. She was small, and thin, but that arm felt like a rod of metal. Advancing age only seemed to make her harder, forging a mom-shaped figure of iron. Any softness melted away years ago.
Stephen said, “Maybe he doesn’t want to talk about it.”
“Well, he needs to talk about it,” she said, not reacting to his hand on her shoulder. “Just, can you please try?”
“Of course, mom.” He did give her a hug, then, from behind and off to one side. Hesitant. Awkward. She paused, not turning around, not making eye contact. She wiped at the glass in her hand.
A lathe powered down with a dying screech as Stephen opened the door to the workshop. He stepped into the dry aroma of sawdust that filled — that always filled — the shop’s air. His father unclamped a rod of wood from the machine and ran an appraising hand along its length. He spotted Stephen and smiled.
“Hi, son,” Robert said. His hand kept feeling the surface of the wood in his grip.
For the first time since his mother called and asked that he come over, Stephen felt like crying, and didn’t know why exactly. All the things he had to say, they didn’t seem to want to come out.
He nodded to the pale rod in his father’s hand. “What’re you putting together?”
Robert said, “Here, look at this.” He led Stephen into the back corner of the room, where the pieces of a chair sat on a dusty beige cloth tarp. A square seat, a simple ladder back, and two other chair legs lay in a neat row. “Your mother’s been complaining about our dining room chairs. I thought I’d make her a new set. It’s only been twenty years since we bought the current set, but you know how impatient she gets.” He winked.
The sawdust irritated Stephen’s eyes. He ran his sleeve over his face. Static electricity pulled at the hairs on his arm as he did so. “Looks good,” he said. “What kind of wood are you using?”
His father blinked at the wood in his hand. Just as Stephen was sure he hadn’t heard or understood the question and was about to repeat it, Robert said, “Sugar maple.”
“Oh yeah?”
“It’s not something I like to work with, most of the time,” Robert said. “Usually I like oak for the furniture stuff, as you know. Classic for a reason.”
As you know. Stephen could not, at that moment, recall if he did know that. His father liked to talk about his woodworking a lot. Stephen often only pretended to listen. Why did he not pay better attention? Robert was not a natural talker. That made the things he said more important. What a cocky little shit Stephen must have been as a child. His father deserved better.
Robert was looking at the pieces, silent. The way he stood there not doing anything made Stephen’s stomach hurt.
Where the man lacked verbal skills, he certainly made up for with other talents. Robert Greene was not one to sit still for long. He was always moving, creating, fixing or adjusting something. Tweaking and improving. Bringing something new into the world. Now he stood, not moving, not even rubbing the chair leg in his hands. Just staring. Stephen had come over to talk to his father about his news. But with Robert staring blankly at his own work, clutching a chair leg, he couldn’t do it.
“Why aren’t you working with oak on this project, then?” Stephen asked.
Robert smiled again, with naked gratitude in his eyes. That hurt, too. “Well, I wanted to try something different. It’s never too late to learn something new, right?” he said, checking the chair leg with his hands again. “Sugar maple has a nice smooth finish. It just takes more care and work than oak. And it doesn’t hold glue nearly as well. You don’t want to use it for a big project. It takes a lot more attention if you want to do it right. Here,” he said, handing the chair leg to Stephen.
It was soft and smooth, and tapered. Robert’s finger pointed to various spots along the length of the wood. “See the grain? The birds eye pattern. Different, don’t you think??”
“Yeah,” Stephen said. His father’s pointing finger looked like a bony stick.
“I’m not going to use any varnish on these. The finish itself would be nice enough with just a little oil, I think.” Robert looked up into his son’s eyes. “What do you think? Should I use varnish?”
Maybe it was a test of some kind. His father did sometimes do that, for reasons Stephen never really understood. Maybe he really did want or need someone’s opinion. Or maybe it was rhetorical. It was impossible to tell.
Stephen said, “No, definitely not.” They both turned their gaze back to the wood and inspected it in silence, nodding in agreement.
“Dad?” Stephen said. “I never…” Then he couldn’t remember what he was going to say. His father didn’t ask him what it was he never. They let the unfinished thought hang, and nodded at pieces of a hand-made chair.
Paula was wiping down the counter when Stephen entered the kitchen again, rubbing the sawdust from his eyes and nostrils. This time she turned and faced him.
She said, “Well?”
Stephen waited for the door to shut behind him. “Well, we talked.”
Paula nodded, and her face crumpled. Stephen rushed forward to grab her as she sagged, afraid she was going to fall over. Had he really been thinking she was an unbendable piece of iron? She just felt small in his arms.
She pushed him away and went back to wiping down the counter. Stephen waited for her questions, but they didn’t come. He had no idea what he would say if she asked him what they talked about.
With a hum, the lathe powered up again. Robert would be starting to shape the fourth length of sugar maple to finish the first chair. It would take a while to get right, but Robert was patient, to a fault. His wife was like that wood to him, maybe. Hard, but worth spending the time on.
No, that was stupid. She wasn’t sugar maple any more than she was iron. People were just people.
There were deep, dark circles under Paula’s eyes. Robert was always a heavy sleeper, waking only when he was ready to work. Paula woke several times each night, Stephen knew. A chronic restless sleeper. Even so she got up with him each morning, to cook breakfast and take care of the bills and do the shopping, everything that allowed Robert to spend time on his hobbies. His hobbies that sometimes, more often than not, brought in enough money to make the income from the adult reading course Paula taught during the summer a bonus rather than a necessity.
Stephen collapsed into a seat at the kitchen table. The chair creaked under him but held steady. Oak? Stephen had no idea what kind of wood it was. Something not flashy or exotic, just there to get the job done. The chair had been in continual use for two decades and only complained a little when you put your weight on it. He would need to ask Dad what kind of wood it was, so that he could put a name to it. There were still so many things to ask. Eventually, despite his father’s words, it would be too late to learn.
Sean MacKendrick splits his time between Colorado and Texas. When not writing fiction, he writes code as a software engineer. You can follow him for updates on Twitter/X @SeanMacKendrick, or on Bluesky @SeanMacKendrick.bsky.social.
Header art wood sculpture by Emin Asgarov.
