Inheritance

My father built things badly. This is not cruelty. He would have said the same, and did, usually while looking at a shelf that listed fifteen degrees off horizontal or a gate that required two hands and a shoulder to close. He was a plumber by trade. Pipes he could do. Pipes were logical — water goes downhill, joints need to be tight, and if you've made a mistake, the evidence arrives promptly on the kitchen floor. But somewhere around his fortieth birthday he decided he could also do carpentry, and the next twenty years were a monument to optimism over ability. The bookshelf in the hallway. He built it in a weekend from pine boards he'd found behind the hardware store. It held books only if you didn't mind them tilting gently to the left, which gave the impression that every author in our house was leaning in to share a secret. My mother put bookends on every shelf. The bookends slid. The books followed. We'd hear the slow avalanche from the living room — the particular sound of paperbacks hitting carpet — and nobody got up because it happened twice a week and the books were never damaged, just rearranged. The garden bench. He measured once, which is half the recommended number of times, and one leg was shorter than the others by an inch and a half. He fixed this with a folded piece of cardboard that lasted through two summers before disintegrating in a rainstorm. Then he cut a piece of wood to fit, and it was too thick, so the bench tilted the other way. He called this leveling. The treehouse. The less said about the treehouse the better, except that it survived eighteen months and nobody was seriously injured and the insurance company was understanding. He died in 2019. The bookshelf is still in the hallway. I straightened it. I replaced the screws with proper ones, shimmed the base, added a brace at the back. It's level now. The books stand upright. It looks fine. I miss the lean. I didn't know I would, but I do. The hallway is more correct now and less his. The books are where I put them and stay where they are and nothing falls and the house is quiet where it used to make sounds that meant my father had tried something and the something had opinions about it. I can't build either. My wife watched me attempt to assemble a flat-pack wardrobe and left the room at the point where I was reading the instructions upside down and hadn't noticed. I got it done. It lists slightly to the left. Some things are genetic. The shelf. The lean. The willingness to start something you can't quite finish and call the result good enough. I looked at the wardrobe when it was done, imperfect and standing, and I thought: that'll do. Which is what he always said.