Handyman Dan and the Closet of Tears
A short piece based on a recent writing prompt.
After it’s all over, my handyman admits he had been dreading coming to my house for weeks. Fair enough. An IKEA wardrobe had been waiting for him. Danny bears the last remnants of an ante-bellum Southern accent, wears a trucker hat, and calls my leggings “britches,” but he had heard the legend of IKEA furniture.
It’s that boomer work ethic, I guess. The man never conveys his dread until we are done. He never complains. In the almost five hours we work, he steps away only twice to smoke and once to eat his peanut butter crackers (“my Nabs” as he calls them.) The only hint of frustration is when he accidentally nicks one of the closet doors with a drill bit.
“Dawg,” he says.
As we work, elbow deep in cheap screws (that is also one of his few complaints), I even try to goad him a little. To let off some of the pressure. As if to say, “I am sensitive to your plight, sir!”
“This manual.” I say. “Can they make it any harder to read?”
“I like the pictures, “ he says, even as he is trying to turn the pages of cheap paper with his dry, cracked thumbs. His arms, where the flannel sleeves are rolled back, are nearly black from the sun. He’s got thick bandaids wrapped around the index fingers of both hands from smashing them in a ladder a few weeks earlier.
“Tried to get out of assembling my closet, eh?” I say with a wink to his hands. But he’s honed in on trying to separate the pages with his thumb and now his tongue is rolling across his bottom lip.
When we get to points of assembly where I can't help, I’m running around trying to anticipate his needs. “Need the ladder? Need your hammer? Want something to drink? A sandwich? Oh right. Your Nabs.” By the end, when it comes down to screwing on the doors, I can only sit on my bed and watch. Turns out it’s not simply an issue of hanging them on hinges. You can put screws in all the right places and the doors can still be uneven. There is a hidden screw that lets you adjust the up or down or left or right of the door so that in the end there’s no gap when you close it with the other door. And well, gosh, I had no idea. Not until Danny put in all the screws and then let the door fall closed.
“Would you lookit that!”
“Oh. Uh. Wow?”
“Would you lookit that!”
This is, hands down, the most excited I’ve ever seen this guy.
“I mean to tell you right on the nose!”
There were four of those doors that each were a lottery draw, and two of them didn’t close flush. So then I watched Danny mess around with the hidden screw, and though he never said "dawg" again, I could tell it was a major nuisance. A lot of kneeling down and standing back up and twice up the step ladder. When the last door, like the first, sat square on the hinges, right on the dot, and closed dead center in the middle of the closet, we both whooped it up.
“Look at that.”
“Hot dawg it!”
“I mean on the munny.”
Danny’s been my handyman for a few years now. We have our recited departure where he offers to help clean up and I say noooooo, I will gladly do the sweeping. And he says, are you sure? And I say of course. Go tend to some other helpless single woman and God bless you. But as I’m dragging the broom around, Danny stands up about as straight as his scoliosis will let him and says,
“You know I sure dreaded coming to build this. Been dreading it for weeks.”
“Oh, me, too. Didn’t even want to think about it.”
“But it wasn’t near as bad as I thought.”
What a relief. Good handymen are hard to find and harder to keep. I thought maybe after this project Danny would delete me from his flip phone. Yet he had expected far worse than the eight giant boxes and one random paper bag of parts.
“You want me to help clean up.”
“Nope, I’m glad to do it.”
“You sure?”
I’m feeling like Danny and I have bonded a bit. I sense camaraderie between us like we are fresh home from war.
“Hey, Danny, looks like that last closet door is crooked.”
He slowly stands up to the full height of his youth. For five seconds he is cured of scoliosis.
“That ain’t funny.”
“Sorry.”
