Liam doesn’t, because drinking hard liquor makes him crave oxys, but he says, “Sure.”
Everett finds another glass, pours two fingers of rye, then adds water to it from a pewter pitcher. “The well here’s still wet,” he says. “Which is a minor miracle.”
“I always loved this water,” Liam says, taking a sip. “It never changes. You been in the woodshop much lately?”
Everett holds up his hands and makes two quaking fists. “I’m no good for joinery or chess pieces anymore. I’m building big, ugly picnic tables now. Just some old two-by-fours and some red paint. I give them to parks and public schools in Estevan. I think they might already have all the picnic tables they need and probably just burn them all somewhere behind city hall. Still, they’re kind to accept them. It gives me something to do.
“But maybe I’ll come out to New York and be your helper,” he continues. “You sure those people pay good money for these weathered old boards? You aren’t conning them somehow? And also: do you think they might be in the market for some picnic tables?”
Liam laughs and shakes his head. “People like old wood. It comforts them, I guess. Still, I like my work. It fills the days.”
“Living is just a whole bunch of work,” Everett says, nodding his head. “The trick is finding some that you don’t hate.”
Liam takes another drink and feels the cheap rye flare in his mouth.
“And how’s your mother?” Everett asks. “I haven’t heard from her in a while.”
According to her wishes, Liam had Willow cremated, and dispersed her ashes in one of her favourite faerie farms, deep in central British Columbia.
“She’s good,” Liam says, nodding his head. “Off in some forest somewhere saving the world. Don’t ask me which one.”
“You never know where that one is, do you?” Everett says, shaking his head as he takes a drink.
After their glasses are empty, Liam spends a few hours filling his van with boards pulled from a perimeter fence. All that afternoon, he helps Everett build a picnic table from start to finish, then cooks him dinner and leaves by daybreak the next morning.
Three months later, a lawyer in Estevan calls Liam and tells him that Everett has died of heart failure and left Willow the farm. “So it goes to you,” the lawyer says. When Liam returns to the property a week later, he finds a fine maple coffin—its joinery and intricately carved decoration as flawless as the one they’d built for Temple years ago—stretched across the table in Everett’s woodshop. Liam buries Everett among the maples out near the lot line, where Temple’s grave is, though it was never marked.
How his great-uncle had managed to fashion so beautiful a piece of woodwork with his gnarled, tremulous hands is still a mystery to Liam. But envisioning the coffin’s fine craftsmanship now recalls to him the viola he made for Meena and then destroyed. His one genuinely beautiful thing.
Two, actually.
Two beautiful things.
Liam has made two beautiful things in his life.
And with this admission rushes in what he’s long ignored, what he’s been willing himself to push out of his thoughts. Because so close to the end of his life, Liam Greenwood is finally ready to fill in the gaps, to undo the knots, to make things true and clear—even if it’s only for a short time.
JACINDA GREENWOOD
ON THE DAY of her birth, he’s working with his phone set to silent, a particulate mask strapped over his face and hearing protection clamped tight over his ears. He’s sanding a slab of expensive Douglas fir that he’ll install in some Brooklyn yoga studio or some corporate office in Manhattan, the drone of his orbital sander nearly erasing the oddly similar drone of guilt in his head.
A week later, Liam still hasn’t replied to Meena’s initial text, sent to announce their child’s existence, when he receives another of her texts, this one telling him that she’s selected a name: Jacinda, after a kind girl Meena once knew in school. She also surprises Liam by revealing that she’s given their child Greenwood as a surname. Meena says she has a few male cousins already carrying the Bhattacharya name forward, and she found it too tragic and unfair that Liam’s surname should die off completely. Even when performing a musical piece, Liam thinks, Meena has always hated endings.
Despite his efforts to banish his daughter’s very existence from his mind through constant toil and a strict regimen of deliberate forgetting, Meena often texts him pictures documenting Jacinda’s early years. A little black-haired girl grabbing at her feet or smearing paint or chasing pigeons, images that Liam always views with half-averted eyes, the way one might glance at an eclipse. He keeps the photos on his phone, though he never prints them out. And now that his phone has been smashed, those photos are gone.
She must be three by now.
Which means she’s already lived a thousand days without him. A thousand days he could have come home with his hands full of splinters, but not too many to prevent him from picking her up and swinging her high enough to brush the ceiling. A thousand mornings his daughter has woken and he hasn’t been there to witness those thick lashes open like wildflowers; a thousand nights he’s failed to read her a story and then watch them close once more.
Liam remembers George Nakashima once writing about how in a traditional Japanese family, a paulownia tree is planted immediately after the birth of a daughter. It’s a species that grows rapidly, and by the time the girl has matured and is ready to leave home, the tree is likewise ready to be harvested for its wood. The handsome, fine-grained boards that it yields are shaped into an ornate chest, inside which the grown girl will store her kimono. For this reason, the paulownia is known as the empress tree, and the most shameful mistake he’s made in all his life, Liam now admits bitterly, is that he never planted one for Jacinda.
He pulls a three-inch woodscrew from the pocket of his Carhartts and begins to scratch some letters into the concrete floor beside him. When was the last time he’d written anything that wasn’t with his thumbs on his phone, something that wasn’t spelling-assisted? He takes great care to get the words down right and arranged in the correct order.
To reduce the chance of making a mistake, he keeps it brief:
EVERYTHING I OWN TO JACINDA GREENWOOD. WITH LOVE, YOUR FATHER
He takes his time, retracing the words again and again with the screw’s tip to carve them deep and ensure their legibility. He wishes everything meant more than it does: his meagre cash savings, a plot of worthless farmland in Saskatchewan, a stack of poetry records, his arsenal of tools, and his work van, all of which must total something in the neighbourhood of fifty grand.
In one of Meena’s most recent texts, she mentioned that Jacinda is bright, and can already identify letters and animals, and that she loves trees most of all. So perhaps she’ll use his money for her education—which is no empress tree, but it’s something.
I’m not ready to die, he first thinks, then whispers aloud, then shouts, the words reverberating in the sparsely decorated room without a scrap of carpet to dampen them. The sound makes him feel minuscule, no bigger and no more consequential than the screw clutched in his fist. And after that, a series of doors begin to close in his head. Never will he know the stories that Temple and his mother whispered about on the porch. Never again will he taste the bitterness of oxycodone or watch fresh wood shavings fly from a lathe or smell a rhubarb pie baking. Never will he ride with his mother in her van, or walk with her through the tall trees. Never will he hear Meena play her viola while she’s wearing pajamas in the kitchen. Never will he feel his daughter’s warmth against his chest. And never will the story be told in full.