Charlie saw where I was pointing, to the chest of narrow metal drawers. He slid the top one open, revealing those odd little electronic things, in racks that arranged them by size. “Your father is a genius.”
I didn’t know what to say. I certainly had never thought of him that way.
“I’m realizing that I work in a garbage heap,” he continued. “We waste hours, digging through bins to find components.” He turned to me with his eyes bright. “It makes sense here. The organization of it all makes sense.”
“I’m glad,” I said.
Then there was a pause, a strange, awkward moment, which I felt down to my toes, but Charlie did not catch. I went to the place I always sat, three steps from the bottom, while Daddy worked. I’d been sitting on that step since I was a little girl, while he told me stories about men whose radios he was repairing, or the HAM operator who had connected with someone in Norway. I would watch, no idea what he was doing with those wires and tools, thinking it was silly how he poked his tongue out when he was concentrating. I was just his daughter, keeping him company. We were soldering ourselves together. The world went away, and we became a universe of two.
Charlie slid onto the bench—good posture, like I’d learned on the organ—and began plucking things from the drawers. “This is great,” he whispered.
A stranger thought occurred to me: One day, I might have a daughter, too, who might sit and watch her father from the stairs, learning about patience and craft, enjoying their quiet bond. And then the most peculiar notion of all, that the person she’d be keeping company might be this boy, right here.
Charlie switched on a soldering iron. “Your father is teaching me without even being here. That’s how smart his organizing is.”
“He has his ways,” I croaked. But Charlie was so enthralled, he did not notice that I’d choked up. “Be right back.”
“Sure, okay,” he said, turning a dial, and I trotted back up those crooked steps.
My mother was drying the dishes. “Everything swell down there?”
I just gave her a hug.
She laughed and made a face. “What’s that all about?”
I couldn’t say. I scurried up to my room, and closed the door. I sat on the bed for a while, looking out the window at nothing. San Diego, England—the people I loved were far away. I knew, too, that if they made it home, when they made it home, life would not go back to the way it had been. I’d finished school, Frank would be a veteran and all grown up. My father would want to spend every possible minute with the wife he’d missed for so long. I couldn’t imagine him wasting evenings alone in the basement.
No, the days of sitting on the third-from-bottom step were over. Life is always rushing away from us, I know that now, but that night it was a new idea. I wrapped the bedspread around myself, my grandmother’s old quilt, reds and blues in a flying geese pattern she’d sewn while pregnant with my mother. And I had myself a good pout.
“Brenda?” my mother hollered from downstairs. “You need anything?”
“I’m fine,” I yelled back. “Be right down.” But for a long time, I didn’t go anywhere.
Gradually I recovered, hurried past her reading in the overstuffed chair, and headed straight to the basement. Halfway down the stairs, I realized I’d brought along my quilt. Meanwhile Charlie had finished something, I could see a little teepee of metal plates shielding the soldering iron, but he was not at the table.
“Charlie?” I called out. “You still here?”
“What the heck are these for?” He poked his head out from the unlit storage area, back behind the furnace. He was holding an organ pipe nearly his own height. “Is your dad building a cathedral down here?”
I pointed at the soldering table. “What about your practicing?”
“I needed a break or I would have burst into flames.” He approached with the pipe. “But honestly. You don’t sell cathedral organs.”
“There are only a few pipe repairmen in Chicago,” I explained, “and they’re all expensive. My father does the small jobs. He figures churches will refer customers to him down the road.”
“This wouldn’t be too hard to fix though.” Charlie held the pipe horizontally. “The seam has split, that’s all.”
“Any fix is hard when your repairman is in San Diego till who knows when.”
“Don’t the churches complain?” He ran his sleeve down the pipe and it came away gray with dust. “This must have been down here for years.”
“I guess the war is teaching patience to all kinds of people,” I said. “Even me.”
It slipped out, but Charlie didn’t let me get away with it. “What are you impatient for, Brenda?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Knowing more, I guess. Understanding more.” I shrugged. “Maybe being grown up.”
“I think the war is making that happen pretty fast anyway,” he said. “Being eighteen today is completely different from being eighteen five years ago.”
Neither of us had more to say about that. “Get back to work, you,” I said finally. “Enough chat. You’ve got to earn that chicken supper, or else next time instead of the bird, my mother will skin you.”
“Yes, my joyous work. Because I didn’t do it enough already today.”
I was glad to change the subject. “What’s the trouble?”
Leaning the organ pipe against the wall, Charlie shuffled back to the soldering table. “I’m trying to build a very tight assembly, but I can’t find a tape measure.” He scooped up a bunch of short pieces of wire in various colors, all with gray blunt tips. “I’m estimating, but the lengths aren’t right.”
I leaned over the thing he was making, and each connection was a separate piece of wire, like he was using cut-up cannelloni. “Why are you doing it this way?”
“This is how I was taught. What do you mean?”
“Don’t get touchy,” I said. “It’s just not how my father does it.”
“Oh really.” Charlie crossed his arms. “You’re going to teach me now?”
“Jerk.” I crossed mine too. “If you don’t want to know—”
“No, please.” He tossed the wire scraps back on the table. “Enlighten me.”
I rolled my eyes. “Charlie, even I can tell that measuring piece by piece takes forever. Look.”
I picked up one of the spools, and stood over the work he’d abandoned. “Clip one end to the starting place, and bend the wire”—I unwound the spool over each of the components, like it was yarn, making one continuous line—“Till you reach the end. My father doesn’t measure anything. He touches the iron where the wire has to connect.” I reached the last component and pressed the wire onto it. “Done.”
Of all the times I’d seen Charlie’s shocked expression, that one won the contest. His eyes followed my wire its whole length, while his jaw hung slack.
“Careful there,” I teased, “or some bird will build a nest in your molars.”
He closed his mouth, but leaned over the table like he was reading scripture. “Do you know how ingenious that is?”