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This writing was accepted for publication in the 84 page perfect-bound issue... Down in the Dirt magazine (v097) (the August 2011 Issue) You can also order this 5.5" x 8.5" issue as an ISSN# paperback book:						This writing also appears in this 6" x 9" ISBN# paperback “Catch Fire in the Treetops” Order this 6" x 9" ISBN# book:

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A Single Day

Karen Alea

    There have been times when I’ve bought lumber that was smooth and white on one side and gaped and pickled on the other. But I always put that marred side where it would face inside, letting the good side, that faultless side, face the world. It was a matter of economy, though it made my gut prickle with bile.
    My workshop was on the right out on an old road that led to poverty housing and warehouses. No sign, just an open door and dusty windows. Janet used to come in and clean them, saying that if people could just see through, see my workmanship, I’d get business off the street. But it wasn’t that kind of street. Just trucks and the occasional drifter. To me, the sawdust on the windows spoke of its own kind of work—a man inside spinning his world.
    Janet had stayed with me through high school and agreed to marry me soon after. We were both the type that liked to follow through with something. We grew up together, spent those teenage years on the phone where we’d let the receiver fall from our hands. “What were we talking about?” And go on in the fashion of youth that knew life would never run out of things to talk about.
    We’re both talkers. Once we finished learning about each other, married and moved in, I must admit, I slowed down my mouth. She’d continue, finding smaller and smaller things to talk about, like the weeds in the garden and the way the man at the post office had a crooked toupee. I was falling in love with my work, fancying myself an artist, though all I made was cabinets and chairs. I got to thinking it was the way I put on a knob or a hinge that altered something beyond my little shop, beyond out lives. Making something with my hands, feeling the splinters go under my nails, was god work, though I wouldn’t speak that out loud.

    We rented a small cottage near the square, surrounded by overrun lawns and houses rented to college kids. I couldn’t understand, still don’t, why the area is so neglected and people would rather build cookie-cutter two stories with no land. These homes were built by men who thought each part of the house through. They might lack a modern comfort, but nothing that a hammer and some nails can’t fix up if someone is willing to put their own mark on it.
    While Janet worked at a medical office, going out with the girls on Thursday nights, I found solace in my workshop, the lamps on and unworked wood lying on the work bench. I’d treat myself on that night, work on projects that weren’t commissioned, farm tables and chairs I knew I could sell once someone took a look. I’d lay out the wood and switch the pieces around until my eye could lay on them without seeing a flaw. It was odd the way the surface would be straight and flat with one combination, but if you moved the pieces around, even one, it would look like rubbish.

    In May Janet got pregnant.
    I called her Rainbow. It was from thoughts of promise and spring rain and later it represented the shades of dark to light and back that she brought out of me.
    Seven pounds on the dot, born the day the doctor said, and Janet barely made it to the hospital, just heaved a sigh when she was put in the bed and Rainbow pushed her head against the world and barely gave the doctor time to get gloved up to help twist her out of Janet. Jan, is what she likes to be called now, living somewhere in the west, I assume Arizona, she always talked about the desert.
    Janet went back to work after two months. This time on first shift at a retirement center. She’d take Rainbow out of the crib I made her before I knew what love was and was just showing off my skills as a carpenter, and lay the baby by me. I didn’t want her in that crib much at all. Wanted her beside me where her mouth gaped open and the sweet smell of milk drifted out. Her hair light as a fawn’s, behind her ears wrinkled like an old man.
    If a man can know love like that once in his life, he’s a lucky and a cursed man.
    I wanted to build her a playhouse and a see saw and furniture for her baby dolls, at the same time I didn’t want to leave her side. My workshop felt like an empty tomb or a barren womb. Time ticked slowly and I began to rush through my jobs just to get home and breathe in her smell and let my stomach ease into a sweet rest. Each time I swept the wood with my hand I thought of her skin, the way she had tiny hairs above her lips and how her legs bowed at the shins like seasoned wood.

    Janet’s female organs failed after that. Something genetic where cells kept growing, making her huddle over the dinner table. The doctor told her he’d have to take it all out. At work I took it out on boards, hammering straight through a piece of pine and having to throw it out on the pile.
    It wasn’t that I wanted another child, but I wanted someone for Rainbow to play with. Maybe I held it against Janet, those cells that traveled inside of her, trying to destroy us. And what if they had hurt Rainbow? What if Janet’s body had stuck something inside her and when she grew up we’d find a disease that would take her from us. Now that I have time to think, these are the thoughts I come up with.
    This is when I began to wrap my life around Rainbow. It wasn’t just love, not just family, but I had a soul to protect.

    I lived for Sundays. Janet and Rainbow were my religion.
We’d lie on the bed, the sheets cool and clean from a Saturday wash, and play with her curls and knees and toes. Almost three, she still had fat layered around her joints and when she jumped on the bed her legs jiggled.
    Some big company pulled into town and bought up the retirement village where Janet worked. Things got shaken up. She got to keep her job but got moved to the night shift that June. She wanted to be a nurse and we were saving up for her to start school in the fall. I was doing kitchen cabinets for new construction, a job that would never let up until the last tree was felled and the last breath on earth was breathed.
    Janet and I juggled. We weren’t going to put Rainbow in daycare. The neglect in the news, the losing of a kid, the viruses. There was a certain pride we had in sacrifice, as if that was really when parenthood started.
    I’d end up at the workshop at odd hours, ran cabinets back and forth at dusk to the worksites, and forgot when I had eaten lunch or breakfast. Rainbow rode in the truck with me, letting the wind blow at the top of her head until she laughed and spittle laced the corners of her lips.
    The men wanted to pick her up, swing her, tell her a story they said was a hit with their own kids. But I held her tight, made a
quick leave, told them she didn’t take to strangers much.
    “What’s her name,” a boy with a leopard tattoo asked me. I told him. He had a daughter named Summer and he guessed there was something about nature names that suited little girls.
    People speaking to her, speaking to me about her...it made me nervous. Reminded me that she was touching the edge of the world and that I couldn’t hold her in mine forever.
    I didn’t share with Janet the growing dread inside me. An awful thing. A wild thing that stalked from behind the brushes, only eyes peering through.
    I thought if something could make me happy, bring calm and love so deep, then it must be unfair, shake up the balance of the universe and sooner or later it would be taken away. I became alert of cars in the road, and windows left open, viruses traveling around the grocery store and mosquitoes coming off the lake. I felt it was a matter of time and though I tried to press that thought out of my mind, thought that there were millions of parents on this earth with their kids and they get to see them grow up healthy and fine, I still couldn’t battle the thought they did not love their child with my extreme brokenness. It was a matter of time. I was a carpenter; I knew about leveling.

    I didn’t get any walk-ins. It wasn’t that kind of place. So when Hollander opened my door and gave the shop a rectangle of clear air for a few seconds, I thought he was lost, needed directions.
    When Hollander walked in my shop I felt right away he was bringing in something bad. Just get a feeling sometimes about
people. He was older than I was, starting to lose his hair, though it hung long past his collar. He dressed well, like someone who made his living at a desk.
    “Gerald Blevin told me about you. Said you did his new cabinets.”
    “I did.”
    “Want a wardrobe done. Dutch lines. Sort of modern and bare. Six foot high, light wood.”
    If I were to describe him as furniture, I would have said the same words that came out of him. He was precision and blonde wood. Had he looked at my magazines at home, the tear outs of immaculate lines? Did he come to chastise me, dangle what I loved in front of me, only for me to make it with my sweat and then take away from me?
    “I’ve got a few ahead of you. Maybe take me a couple of months.”
    “I’ll give you ten percent extra to push it up a bit.”
    I told him to bring in some pictures from magazines and I would get looking for the wood. He went to shake my hand. I had my gloves on, but I could still feel his bones right through the padding.
    That night I squeezed Rainbow tightly. There was wrong out in the world, deceptions and cleverness and I felt hopeless preparing her. Thoughts of protecting her ravaged me until I sat stunned on the sofa, her asleep on my chest, the weatherman talking in drones about a snow storm in some northern state.
    I was not happy to see Hollander return two days later, a folder in hand. He spread photos out on the desk. “Like this. But I want the bottom to lie flat on the floor, no legs.”
    “You have carpet or flooring?”
    “Cherry wood.”
    The picture in my mind of the deep burnt brown and the silky white wood atop made me envious of this man who held my same taste, but could afford to execute it.
    He returned the next day and the next, pulling my desk chair out and sitting upon it. He brought his lunch, said he worked in the building on the parallel street, the one people did walk down, where the city hung baskets on the street lamps filled with pansies and daisies. I didn’t ask him what he did, but I assumed he was some lawyer or architect.
    “You like Greek food?”
    He brought me lunch the following day. Lamb folded up in a bread wrap, the white sauce dripping onto the wood-chip sprinkled floor. I asked to pay for it, but he waved his hand, wiped at his bulging mouth with a napkin.
    “My treat.”
    I worked on his piece more frequently, calling other customers to tell them things would be a bit longer than expected. Only one protested. I juggled between the wardrobe and kitchen cabinets made of fiberboard. It was like swapping from milk to wine.
    Janet would have Rainbow while I went to work in the morning and then I would return home as Janet was leaving. We barely saw each other until Sundays and we lived for autumn when we would seem like a family of three again.
    I would come home from work and cook two meals, one for me and one for Rainbow. She loved vegetables and I took pride in knowing that one day when she began to shun them I had laid down a good foundation in her body. I believed anything that happened when you were young, those crucial years they said, would be the blueprint to her future.
    We’d eat in front of the news, which would make me feel a bit guilty, all that bad stuff. But we were together and that counted for a lot. A lot more than I got as a child.
    Then I’d lay her down in her crib. It was almost time for a bigger bed, but Janet and I couldn’t bear seeing that girl grow out of anything.
    Rainbow didn’t like being alone too much and she started this cry that would shoot straight into my gut, twist it up until I had to go get her and lay her in bed with me. I used to watch the late movie or read through a magazine, but soon I was putting out the light early and having her lay on my shoulder, letting her mouth gape open with sleep. I stared at that face like some people stare at art.
    Hollander asked me about my family. Asked me what my wife’s name was. I told him Sarah before I even knew that I was lying. I blamed him for the lies, for the way the sun hid behind clouds that day and the weather turned grey. He was the kind of man I knew from way back, back when I was in school, the kind who could not be reasoned with. He was the kind that went to college and always knew the answers in a quick jab sort of way that made people throw their money at him and women look twice.
    As he watched me shave the rough out of a plank he asked me what her name was. “You have a girl, right? Something in your hands. My father had hands like that. I’m the only boy of four. It was like he was afraid to grab on to things too tight.”
    I pulled the circular saw from under the bench, held it until my knuckles increased size, showed him an unyielding grip and then turned it on and cut a perfectly good piece of plank, one that should have been saved for the tall sides of the wardrobe. With my eyes cut, I could see the upturn of his lips.
    I checked the back yard that night. No reason. Hollander wasn’t the type to come looking for me, but I listened to the wind between the tall grass.
    Rainbow sat on the carpet, teetering between her diaper and her chubby legs. She needed to be potty trained. Janet said I needed to be consistent, go when she did, praise her and give her treats. I knew I wanted to keep her a baby, keep her in my house, under my watch. I wanted to let the world spin any way it wanted, but in our house, thin-walled as it may be, there was something sacred as a church that I held onto, a rightness I never had.
    I went back to work in the middle of Janet’s one night off, Rainbow still quiet in her crib. I made my way in the light of the moon to the shop and worked on that damn wardrobe that began to snicker back at me with its perfect lines and slow edges. The dust whirled around the ceiling light like moths and the sound of the saw and the sander echoed like it never had the chance to during the day, as if it were their time to rule the world.
    When Hollander returned I had it upright, measuring the holes for handles.
    “Nice.” He walked a circle around it and placed his hand to the wood in a sensual way, a caress that made his jaw clench and I wanted to slap his hand off of it, punch him until something in me felt peace.
    Though I wanted to do some last touches with glue and wood caulk, I told him it was finished. I wanted him out, I wanted it out. I’d already spent the night before sweeping out every last wood flake that had been shed off the wardrobe’s skin and tied it up in a bag and dropped it at the dump.
    “Can you deliver this?”
    “I don’t deliver. I’ll give you a number of someone.”
    “I want you to see it in my house.”
    “You enjoy.”
    “I insist.” He wrote out a check, added the final ten percent he promised.
    “Bring your little girl. I have some toys. I’ve got a niece. She’s too old for those things now. Into boys and malls and all that. But I kept them.” He looked out of the window as he talked and tapped his hand on the worktable.
    I didn’t go to his house, didn’t see him again. Signed his check with an ounce of unwillingness and asked the teller for cash, wanted to use it up, not let it mingle in the bank with our money. But there was still a paste on my lungs, a coating of wrong that he passed to me.
    I lied down at night with Rainbow. Her nose and cheek bones made a perfect silhouette and the evenness of her cheeks astounded me. I loved the feeling of a nice smooth piece of pine or oak and her face gave me that same pleasure. The plane of her nose, the carved orbs of her eyes, her lashes lying down across them caused a tilting inside. I had to even my breath and not move my arm to wake her.
    When she woke I would lay on top of her, kiss her face until she laughed and pull her nightgown up and blow bubbles on her belly button until her giggles pierced the high octave. She pulled on my ears and I breathed in her scent again and again until it was misery.
    I was her father, I knew every part of her body. I changed her diapers, wiped her bottom, put the thermometer under her tongue. Her body was an extension of mine, something pure and whole. I was a cleansed man.
    Then I touched her. Touched her in a way that some would say was wrong. It wasn’t wrong. She was my family and I would never hurt her like people did out in the world would.
    Something grows out of love and something moves you in a way that makes you want to be close. I know I am not the only one. I’ve heard mothers at the playground talk about how they wanted to eat their little babies up they were so cute and I would say I felt that too. And when I touched her, when I did those things that were ruled only for lovers, I felt that it was pure, that I meant no harm, I just wanted to be as close as I could to my Rainbow.
    And was it sex? Was it what would happen between lovers? Never. And that is what no one understood. The touch, the caress, was adoration, mystification. It was a worship of her, of her soul that grew inside her. What I was doing was some sort of marking, a way of having her be with us, no one else, no one like Hollander, like the boy with the leopard tattoo.
    There was nothing sexual, and if you would believe me, I can get through...get through a day, a single day.
    She cuddled with her mother early in the mornings while I stood in the heat of summer in my workshop. Rainbow wanted Janet to touch her the same way. When I got home they were gone. Janet called on the phone. She was at her parents’. She screamed into the phone for me to explain myself, bastard, explain myself and I have two minutes because she isn’t just calling a lawyer, but the police. And all I could scream back was that I loved them, God, I loved them and they were every bit of my blood in my veins. I would die without them. And she yelled—then die.
    Neither of us went to work and the calls came in our machine, people looking for us, but as far as I was concerned creation had stopped, nothing would grow, be built, be invented. The world was tired and done.
    Janet’s father came and pounded on the door and yelled obscenities, said he was going to pull off every thing attached to me, stuff them inside. The neighbors called the cops and when they made me open the door, I told them all that happened. In my head, they would understand, they had children, didn’t they? But they pulled me in the car and called Janet and the ball rolled down a mossy hill.
    I was locked up until they pulled me into a courtroom and there stood Janet. All I could say back was where is she, where is my Rainbow? My body ached for her and my eyes stung.
    My lawyer had no understanding for me. A psychologist gave me tests and asked about my upbringing, trying to give me an escape in all this. But I told them outright the truth. I wasn’t afraid of it. Didn’t they know love; didn’t they go too far in love?
    They say love doesn’t hurt, love isn’t hard work, love is natural. Nothing is farther from the truth. Love is the only thing we are born not knowing how to do. And all we can do is try to understand it, try to express it. Love isn’t bright and flawless, it is all the colors in-between.
    I was guilty and they didn’t need a jury to figure it all out. I wasn’t hiding a thing. I just wanted to see her. But the law said I couldn’t see her. Ever. Even after I got out of jail in fifteen years.

    I hear she’s a tomboy now. The jail psych said that happens sometimes. Girls feel they are not pure like the other girls and identify with the boys more.
    Janet, Jan, sent me a report card, showed me her grades. Bad at math like Janet. But no picture. Jan said it wouldn’t be right and I guess I see her point in some way. She thinks I am a filthy person, someone taken over with perverse lusts.
    I dream during the day and at night about what she looks like now. I remember the silhouette of her cheeks and the plane of her nose and I try to place it on a twelve year old. I can still smell her once in a while when I least am thinking about her...it enters me like a palsy and I am on my knees.
    In the dark of my cell I try and reconstruct her, the joints, the hinges, the smooth planks of her legs, the pickled and gnarled pieces facing inward, hidden where only a carpenter would know.

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