Walter Bowen Fixes Things

Chapter 1: The Workshop

The rocking chair sat in the corner of the garage like a piece of unfinished grief.

Hank Bowen had built it eleven years ago, back when Janet was still around to sit in things he made. Red oak, steam-bent back slats, a seat curve he'd shaped with a spokeshave over three patient weekends. It was, by any objective measure, the finest piece of furniture he'd ever produced. Janet had sat in it exactly twice—once to test it, once to read a magazine—before it migrated to the corner of the living room, then to the spare bedroom, then to the garage after she left.

Now it lived between a band saw and a pile of maple offcuts, and nobody sat in it at all.

Hank didn't mind. He didn't mind most things these days, which was either a sign of hard-won wisdom or clinical depression, depending on who you asked. His doctor, Dr. Pham, leaned toward the latter. His neighbor, Lou Gentry, leaned toward the former but mostly because Lou was seventy-three and believed that not minding things was the pinnacle of human achievement.

It was a Tuesday morning in October, and Hank was in his workshop doing what he did every Tuesday morning: standing at his bench with a cup of black coffee, staring at a piece of cherry wood, and deciding what it wanted to become. This was the part of woodworking that nobody talked about. Everyone wanted to see the finished product—the gleaming tabletop, the dovetailed drawer, the chair that looked like it had grown out of the floor. Nobody wanted to hear about the forty-five minutes you spent holding a board and thinking.

Hank was sixty-six years old. He was five foot nine and built like something you'd store files in—broad, square, and dense in a way that suggested his bones were made of something heavier than regular bone. His hair had gone white at fifty and had been retreating from his forehead ever since, as if his scalp were slowly revealing itself to the world out of spite. He wore the same thing every day: khaki work pants, a flannel shirt, and a canvas apron he'd bought in 1994 that had more wood stain on it than original fabric.

For forty-one years, he'd taught woodworking at Jefferson Vocational High School in Dayton, Ohio. He'd started in 1975 when he was twenty-five, a kid with a teaching certificate and a belief that young people could be taught to make beautiful things with their hands. He'd retired in 2016 when he was sixty, an old man with a bad knee and a belief that young people could be taught to make beautiful things with their hands, provided you were willing to repeat yourself approximately forty thousand times.

He'd been a good teacher. Not a beloved one—Hank didn't have the personality for beloved—but a good one. His students learned to measure twice, cut once, and never, under any circumstances, put their fingers near a spinning blade. In four decades, he'd had exactly zero serious injuries in his shop, a record he was quietly proud of and loudly vocal about whenever anyone suggested safety standards were excessive.

"You know what's excessive?" he'd say. "A kid with nine fingers."

Retirement had not agreed with Hank, though he would never admit it. The first year, he'd built a dining table nobody would eat at, a set of kitchen cabinets he installed in his already-functional kitchen, and a blanket chest that sat empty in his bedroom because Janet had taken all the blankets worth storing. The second year, he'd built a writing desk, two nightstands, and a set of floating shelves that he mounted in the hallway and then had nothing to put on.

By the third year, the house was so full of handmade furniture that moving through it required the spatial awareness of a cat burglar. The living room alone contained two coffee tables, three end tables, a bookcase, a sideboard, and a bench that blocked the path to the kitchen if you didn't turn sideways. Hank had considered selling some of it, but the idea of someone else owning his work made his stomach clench in a way he couldn't explain and didn't want to examine.

So the furniture stayed, and Hank kept building more of it, and the house grew more cramped, and nobody visited to notice because Hank had systematically declined every social invitation he'd received since Janet left.

Janet had left eight years ago. Not dramatically—there was no screaming match, no thrown dishes, no storming out into the rain. She'd simply come into the garage one Saturday morning while Hank was routing a decorative edge on a picture frame and said, "I want a divorce."

Hank had turned off the router, removed his safety glasses, and said, "What?"

"A divorce, Hank. I want one."

"Why?"

Janet had looked at him with an expression that he'd later identify as the exhausted patience of someone who'd been trying to communicate for thirty-five years and had finally accepted that the message wasn't getting through.

"Because you love your workshop more than you love anything alive," she said.

Hank had disagreed. He'd disagreed calmly and rationally, pointing out that he'd been a faithful husband, a reliable provider, and a man who had never once forgotten their anniversary, though he had occasionally given her furniture for it. Janet had listened to his argument, nodded, and then filed the papers anyway.

In the eight years since, Hank had done absolutely nothing to prove her wrong. He knew this. Somewhere in the back of his mind, in the part that wasn't occupied by wood grain patterns and joinery techniques, he understood that spending every waking hour in his garage was not the behavior of a man who loved things that were alive. But knowing something and doing something about it were two different skills, and Hank had only ever been good at one kind of doing.

He took a sip of his coffee. It had gone cold. He took another sip anyway because wasting coffee was a sin his mother had drilled into him, and some lessons you never unlearned.

The cherry board was twelve inches wide, six feet long, and about as cooperative as a mule with a grudge. It had a slight warp that Hank would need to plane out, and there was a knot near one end that would either become a decorative feature or a structural weakness, depending on where he put it. He was leaning toward a hall table—something narrow, with tapered legs and a single drawer. Nobody needed a hall table. Hank didn't even use his hallway for anything except walking through it. But the wood wanted to be a hall table, and who was he to argue with wood?

He set down his coffee and reached for the jack plane.

Outside, the October sun was doing its best to warm up Dayton, which was like trying to heat a swimming pool with a hair dryer. The leaves on the big silver maple in Hank's front yard had turned the color of a traffic light—red, yellow, and the stubborn green of leaves that hadn't gotten the memo. The street was quiet. It was always quiet. Hank lived on Birchmont Avenue, a residential street in a neighborhood that had been middle-class in the seventies, working-class in the nineties, and was now in the uncertain territory of "transitional," which was a real estate term meaning "we don't know what's going to happen here, but we're going to charge you more rent while we figure it out."

Hank had bought his house in 1982 for thirty-eight thousand dollars. He'd been told recently that it was worth a hundred and sixty thousand, which seemed like a lot of money for a three-bedroom ranch with a kitchen from the Carter administration. But he wasn't selling. Where would he put his workshop?

He ran the jack plane down the length of the cherry board, and a thin curl of wood peeled up and fell to the floor. The sound was like a whisper. The smell was like the inside of a good dream. Hank took another pass, and another, and the warp began to flatten, and the world outside the garage ceased to exist.

This was the thing Janet had never understood, or maybe had understood too well. When Hank was working wood, everything else went away. The bad knee, the empty house, the silence where a marriage used to be—all of it dissolved into the rhythm of the plane, the bite of the chisel, the slow emergence of something beautiful from something raw. It wasn't that he loved his workshop more than anything alive. It was that his workshop was the only place where he felt alive at all.

But try explaining that to a divorce attorney.

He worked through the morning, planing the board flat, then running it through the thickness planer to get it to a uniform three-quarters of an inch. He sketched the table design on a piece of scrap paper, made some measurements, changed his mind about the drawer, changed it back, and then went inside to make a sandwich.

The kitchen was, as previously noted, unnecessarily well-appointed with handmade cabinetry. Hank had replaced the original cabinets—perfectly serviceable pine boxes from 1982—with custom cherry cabinets featuring raised-panel doors, full-extension drawer slides, and hand-cut dovetails that nobody would ever see because they were inside the drawers. He'd also built a spice rack, a knife block, a cutting board the size of a small desk, and a pot rack that hung from the ceiling like a wooden chandelier.

He made a ham sandwich on white bread with yellow mustard and ate it standing at the counter because the kitchen table—a gorgeous slab of walnut with butterfly joints—was covered in woodworking magazines.

The phone rang while he was eating. He looked at the caller ID. Lou Gentry.

Hank considered not answering. He considered this every time Lou called, which was roughly twice a week. But Lou was his neighbor, and Lou was seventy-three, and there was always the possibility that Lou had fallen down or set something on fire, and Hank didn't want that on his conscience.

"What," Hank said, picking up.

"Good afternoon to you too, sunshine," Lou said. Lou had a voice like a trombone that had been left out in the rain—brassy, slightly waterlogged, and louder than necessary. "How's the hermit life?"

"Fine."

"You eat lunch?"

"Eating it now."

"What'd you make?"

"Ham sandwich."

"That's not lunch, that's a cry for help. Listen, Peggy and I are having some people over Saturday night. Just a few folks, nothing fancy. You should come."

Peggy was Lou's wife. She was a retired school librarian with a sweet disposition and an iron will, and she'd been trying to get Hank to socialize since Janet left. She sent over casseroles. She dropped off cookies. She once left a flyer for a singles mixer on his doorstep, which Hank had used as a coaster.

"Can't," Hank said.

"Can't or won't?"

"Both."

"What are you doing Saturday night that's so important?"

"Building a hall table."

"You already have a hall table. I've seen it. It's blocking your hallway."

"This is a different one."

Lou sighed. It was the sigh of a man who'd been having this conversation for eight years and knew how it ended. "Hank, you've got to—"

"I don't got to do anything, Lou. I'm sixty-six years old. I've earned the right to spend my Saturday nights however I want."

"Alone in your garage?"

"It's a workshop."

"It's a garage with pretensions."

"Goodbye, Lou."

"Hank—"

Hank hung up. He finished his sandwich, washed the plate, dried it, put it away, and went back to the garage.

The afternoon passed the way all of Hank's afternoons passed: slowly, productively, and in complete solitude. He cut the cherry board into pieces for the table legs, marked them for tapering, and began the careful work of shaping them on the jointer. The legs would be one and a half inches square at the top, tapering to three-quarters of an inch at the foot. It was a simple design, elegant in its restraint, and it required the kind of precision that left no room for thinking about anything else.

Which was, of course, the entire point.

By five o'clock, the legs were roughed out and the light coming through the garage windows had turned the color of honey. Hank swept the floor—he always swept the floor; a messy workshop was an unsafe workshop—hung up his apron, and went inside to heat up a can of soup.

He ate the soup at the counter. He watched the news. He went to bed at nine-thirty.

Tomorrow, he would get up and do it all again.

This was Hank Bowen's life, and he was fine with it. He was absolutely, completely, one hundred percent fine with it.

He lay in bed in the dark, in the house full of furniture nobody would ever use, and he was fine.

Absolutely fine.