He was thirty-eight, broad-shouldered, with deep brown hair beginning to silver near his temples and hands that showed the small scars of years spent working with wood. That morning he had been repairing the leg of an oak dining table for a teacher who had inherited it from her grandmother. The old joint had loosened, the finish had darkened unevenly, and one careless repair decades earlier had left a crack hidden beneath the veneer. Daniel had spent most of the day undoing the careless repair before beginning his own.
"You could have built a new table by now," his neighbor Alice Pruitt had told him through the open workshop door. She stood with a canvas grocery bag in one hand and the authority of a seventy-eight-year-old woman who had known him long enough to be unimpressed by his excuses. "Might even make yourself some money for a change."
"A new table wouldn't be her grandmother's," Daniel answered without looking up.
Alice smiled. "Claire used to say that."
The name rested between them gently. Claire had been Daniel's wife for eleven years before a sudden illness took her away, and two years had passed without making her absence ordinary. Some mornings Daniel still reached for the second coffee cup before remembering that only one was needed. Sometimes a customer said something about a stubborn piece of furniture and he turned automatically, expecting Claire to offer her opinion from the doorway. Grief had become less like a storm and more like weather he carried, present even when the sky looked clear.
"I have to go to the hardware store," he said, replacing the sandpaper. "The hinges for your cabinet are ready, too."
"And what will you charge me for installing them?"
"I'll think of something unreasonable."
"You'd better," Alice said. "I can't keep paying you in blackberry jam. You'll turn into a jar."
He laughed, and she went home satisfied that she had accomplished at least that much. Daniel washed his hands, checked the unfinished table once more, and locked the workshop. The hardware store was a long walk through the business district, but his truck had been making a noise he preferred not to encourage. Besides, walking gave him a way to notice what the city looked like when he was not trying to reach the next obligation.
Daniel had not always been a furniture restorer. In his twenties he had worked as a designer, spending long days in an office where beautiful objects were discussed in the language of projected revenue. He loved the drawing and the problem-solving, the discovery that a few carefully chosen lines could make an object seem inevitable. He liked the part of design that asked how people actually lived with a thing. He liked the other parts less, and after Claire died he found himself unable to sit beneath fluorescent lights arguing about the marketability of the word timeless.