“This is facing out.”
“That’s facing in. I’m looking at it.”
I turned the rail around. Looked at it. There was a label on the inside that said “this side out” in big block letters. I’d been staring at it for forty minutes and missed it completely. I put my forehead on the floor.
“Say it,” she said.
“No.”
“Say I was right.”
“The rail was ambiguous.”
“There’s a label, Finneas.”
She laughed so hard she snorted, which set the baby off because Alex kicked and she grabbed her side.
We worked on the bassinet together after that. She couldn’t get on the floor at thirty-seven weeks, so she directed from the doorway, eating ice cream, correcting my technique, occasionally tossing a screw at me when I ignored her directions. I assembled, she critiqued, we argued about every single step. It took two hours because we kept stopping to fight about whether the instructions were poorly written or I was poorly reading them.
“Step four says insert dowel A into slot B.”
“There is no slot B. There are three unlabeled holes and a prayer.”
“Try the middle one.”
“I tried the middle one. The middle one is too small.”
“Then you have the wrong dowel.”
“There’s only one dowel.”
“Then you have the wrong hole.”
“Andrea.”
“I’m just saying, if my grandmother can build one of these at seventy-three, you can figure it out at thirty-two.”
“Your grandmother sent this to torture me. She’s testing whether I’m worthy. This is a trial by furniture.”
“She does like you though.”
“She likes me conditionally. The condition is that I build this bassinet without calling for help.”
Andrea threw another screw at me. It bounced off my shoulder. “Less talking, more building.”
When it was done I stood back and looked at it. Solid, level, the curve facing out.
I had one of those moments where the whole thing hits you sideways. I was standing in a nursery Andrea painted yellow because she refused pink or blue, next to a bassinet I just spent two hours swearing at, and my son was going to sleep in it. My kid. In a thing I built. My father never built a damn thing with his own hands. Had staff for everything. Here I was with screws in my pocket, paint under my fingernails, and a woman in the doorway who made me want to be better than what I was raised to be.
“Alexander is going to sleep in that,” Andrea said quietly. She put the ice cream down and walked into the room and stood beside me.
She took my hand. Her fingers were cold from the ice cream container.
“Thank you for building this,” she said. “Even though you put the rail on backward.”
“The rail was ambiguous.”
“It was labeled, Finneas.”
