Woodwork

By day my dad was a mechanical engineer. From 9 AM to 5 PM he had a job at a “blood management” company doing things I had absolutely no understanding of. One day he brought home an award that my mother posted on the fridge. “Black Belt” was the only thing I could discern from it. I spent the next week excitedly bragging to my fourth grade class that my father was a karate master. Years later when we went through his things I would see the fine print: “Certificate of Achievement: Six Sigma” (which Wikipedia defines as “a set of techniques and tools for process improvement”, relating in no way to martial arts.)

On nights and weekends, however, he was a carpenter. More specifically, he installed custom hardwood flooring. This seemed to be a popular side project for immigrant Vietnamese men. Maybe because the start-up costs were manageable? Or maybe because it was all totally off the books, unregulated, and there were no messy working status questions? It’s hard to say.

My uncle had started his own business a decade before, and convinced my father it would be a good way to earn extra cash for my college tuition that loomed darkly on the horizon. With some nudging, he spent a few weeks shadowing him and soon after felt ready to take on his own clients. He purchased a work van that can only be described as something a stranger with candy might use to cruise the neighborhood. We bought vinyl stickers and christened it with the business name:

Tinh’s Hardwood Floors

781–925–5659

Call For Your Free Estimate!

We didn’t have a ruler long enough so the letters were slightly off-center and mostly crooked. But the calls came flooding in.

He was busy nearly every evening after he came home from work, driving around in his van and giving free estimates as advertised. Soft-spoken, kind, and honest, people wanted to work with him. He would book months in advance, and quickly gained a reputation for quality work. Eventually he hired on a handful of men from the immigrant community to help lighten the workload. They would go on to say he was one of the most hard-working men they knew, and an honor to work for.

In the early days though, the only help he could afford was free help: my mother and me. I begrudgingly ripped up carpet and swept sawdust, mostly watching my father work. He was loyal to enormous neon orange pencils and Costco graph paper, which he would use to sketch the flooring designs. Nine times out of ten people preferred standard floors: slats laid end to end, left to right.

Occasionally however, the eccentric homeowner would give him free reign and encourage patterns in the work. Sometimes he would incorporate a different mix of woods: dark rift-cut oak with birds-eye maple, bamboo with a white trim. Other times he would laboriously cut meticulous patterns: diagonal, parquet, herringbone. Regardless of his attachment to any design, it never got the okay unless my mother said so. “How do you like it?” he would ask, showing her his initial sketches. “Looks fine,” she would say, as she did every time. “Looks okay.”

Then the work would begin. It was so intricate, each and every step. The wood had to be cut exactly, to the millimeter, to the precise degree. The pattern was a puzzle in which one poorly shaped slat threatened to ruin the whole. These were the most agonizing projects, sapping the most time and money (though he often refused to charge much more than a standard installation.) It was frustrating to say the least, especially in the beginning when everyone’s inexperience permeated the process, making each step more difficult than the last. Finally, when it all came together, my father would turn to my mother ask again, “how do you like it?” Pulling down her facemask and examining the finished project she’d casually concede, “looks okay.”

But as we left him to the final coats of polyurethane and walked to our car, my mother would grip my arm and ask with a little awe, “isn’t it beautiful what your father can do?”

**

Some days I still dial the phone number of his day job. The pattern of the digits comes to me through muscle memory: across, up, over, down, across, over, over, up, down. A voice I don’t know always picks up and it takes me a full beat before I can bring myself to hang up. It is a number to a phone on a desk at a company where he did things I had absolutely no understanding of.

Other days I am tempted to knock on the doors of the homes in which I helped him. I remember the routes to their front doors through muscle memory: left, left, right, straight across the bridge, right. I imagine ringing the doorbells and asking to take a peek at their living rooms, bedrooms, kitchens, basements. I imagine lying on the floors my father put down with his hands, coming as close as possible to the things that he touched. These floors, this is the work I understand. I imagine smelling the sawdust and polyurethane, watching my mother watch my father, my father watching my mother. I imagine turning to the homeowners and asking them, “how do you like it? Isn’t it beautiful what my father can do?”