His father died in March. They had not been close — thirty years of distance between them, a distance that had calcified over time into something neither of them had figured out how to close before it was too late. There had been phone calls at Christmas, occasional visits that left both of them relieved when they ended. Not enemies. Just strangers who shared a name.
What his father left behind, besides debt and a rented storage unit full of things nobody wanted, was a workbench. It was in the garage of the house where his father had lived alone for the last twelve years. A solid thing, scarred and stained, with a pegboard full of tools hung in careful order above it — each one outlined in marker, so you'd always know where to put it back.
He did not know why he took it. He had a small apartment. He had nowhere for a workbench. He rented a van and brought it anyway, and the tools in their outlined order, and set it up in a corner of his living room that he emptied of furniture to make space.
He had never used tools. He watched videos. He bought wood. He made mistakes that he didn't know enough to recognize as mistakes until later. He split grain, chose the wrong joints, sanded in the wrong direction. The pieces didn't fit the way they were supposed to.
Slowly, across eight months of weekends and evenings, he built a small bookshelf. It took much longer than it should have. He asked for help from strangers on forums, men and women who had been doing this their whole lives and answered patiently. He learned that his father had made all the same mistakes early on — this he discovered from a notebook he found in the storage unit, a record of projects, dimensions, errors noted in the margin in his father's careful handwriting.
The bookshelf is not beautiful. The joints are not perfectly flush. One shelf is slightly bowed. He keeps it anyway, in his living room next to the window. He has put books on it — books he values, books he has read more than once. He has not built anything else yet, but he thinks about it.