The next morning Elly helped Connor take apart everything they’d put together the night before. It was like leaving on a trip and an hour later realizing she’d forgotten the traveler’s checks, and having to turn around and go back.
Connor carried on perversely unperturbed. He detached the bedposts and carried them up to the garage on his shoulders with a hi-ho, hi-ho, off-to-work-we-go kind of attitude. Elly sat at the kitchen table, as put out about the stupid bed as Connor had no doubt been when Wanda brought up the subject. Elly had enthusiastically gone along with it, even though he’d said several times that something was wrong with the bed. Their rudely interrupted lovemaking the night before had certainly proved that point. She felt frustrated beyond belief.
“What’s Connor doing with the bed?” Wanda asked.
“It wobbles,” Elly said.
“Now that you mention it, that’s why he took it apart the last time.”
“I guess.”
Wanda cast a wary glance at her. “I imagine you’re not too happy with me at the moment.”
Elly shrugged, an expression that really said, Darn tootin’. Thinking back to the previous Saturday, Connor’s change of heart must have been prompted by other than a sudden aesthetic awakening. She felt like an idiot for not realizing it at the time.
One thing she was very certain of: she didn’t like people messing with her husband, relative or no. If she really wanted Connor to do something, she was perfectly capable of getting him to do it by her own devices, as crude as that sounded.
Wanda pulled out a chair and sat down. “Yes,” she said, “I confess to sticking my oar in. But if you’ll allow me to make the same mistake twice, I believe I have something useful to say on the subject this time.”
Elly shrugged again but managed to stop glowering.
Wanda said, “I was seven, almost eight, when we moved into the house on Fifth North. That Sunday, Bishop Barngrover came to see us about my baptism. He was a big, jovial man, the opposite of my dad in every way. Dad was out on the porch fitting a new screen for the front door. The bishop was no doubt expecting some contrariness from him, knowing him only by reputation. But Dad didn’t object to my getting baptized, which took most of the wind out of his sails. Still, the bishop was one of those well-meaning men who believed that no social visit could be concluded without a certain quotient of conversation. He looked at what my father was doing and said, ‘Brother McKenzie, I think you’re a little out of square.’
“It was said with every intent of making friendly banter, but Dad took a step back, and, blast it all, the man was right. Hardly enough to notice, but it was. Well, he bade the bishop a curt goodbye and spent the next week working on that door. He rejigged the frame, reset the hinges, tore the jamb down to the two-by-fours.
“Now, the casual observer might think something the bishop said had set him off, that Dad had something to prove and this was his way of showing the man up. People tend to read determined silence that way. Fact was, I doubt my dad even remembered what Bishop Barngrover had said. All he knew was that some thing wasn’t the way it ought to be, and he couldn’t let it be until he’d put it right.
“As you must know by now, McKenzie men are a laconic lot. Don’t let Connor’s verbosity give you the wrong impression.”
Elly had to grin at that gentle dig.
“It’s easy to take what they don’t say personally, and this is the important point—because they won’t tell you—but it’s things that wear their patience thin, not people. The exception being people who won’t leave them alone when they want to be left alone. Off the top of my head, I can’t think of a person in my family a man ever stayed mad at past the moment. Things, yes. But people, no. I can tell you, fair or not, Connor will cheerfully consider that bed his mistake and his responsibility until it is fixed.”
“But it wasn’t—”
Wanda smiled and shrugged.
Elly went to the garage. Connor had set the bedposts on a plywoodand-sawhorse table and was examining them. He put down the flashlight and picked up a pair of needlenose pliers. “Look at this.”
“What?” Elly walked over next to him.
He held up the pliers. In its pincers glinted a small scythe of metal. “What’s left of the threads.” He shook his head. “I should have remembered this, made a note to myself.”
“I was kind of insistent. It wasn’t your idea, remember? It’s not that important. Come to breakfast.”
“In a minute.”
Wanda was waiting in the kitchen. Elly said, “I don’t believe this.”
Connor came in five minutes later with an optimistic expression on his face. “Did you figure it out?” Wanda asked.
“What I should have done in the first place.” He grabbed the phone and the phone book and flipped to “M” in the yellow pages. He ran his finger down the page to the Provo/Orem listings for Machine Shops. “Might as well start with the A’s. Let’s see, that’s American Tool & Die.” He dialed the number. “Yes,” he said, “I need to get some brackets on a bedpost retapped. That’s right, a bed. The threads got stripped. Oh, well, do you know a shop? Knudson Custom Machining—”
He looked around for something to write with. Elly found the listing and pointed to it.
“Yeah, I got it. Thanks.” He hung up. “The smallest jobs they do are engine blocks.” He looked at where Elly was pointing and dialed the number. “Hi, I need to get some machining done on a bed. A bed frame. Oh, okay. You close at three on Saturdays. Right. No, we’ll stop by in an hour or so.” He hung up and said, “They’ll take a look at it.”
“So,” she asked, “what is this great idea of yours?”
“Drill out the old threads and tap new ones. Make it good as new.”
“So why didn’t you think of this before?” Elly teased.
“Probably because I didn’t have the tools. Then I got the idea about the cinderblocks, and that I had the tools for. At any rate, you’re right. I should have fixed it at the time.”
“I wasn’t right,” Elly insisted. “You were right, okay?” She kissed him on the cheek and said, “And we broke the bed, after all.”
Aunt Wanda was the one who laughed.
The Provo industrial park was located at the south end of University Avenue, between the golf course, I-15, and the Union Pacific tracks. Knudson Custom Machining was a hanger-like structure identified only by a sign over the open bay:
Welding and Fabrication Lathe and Drill Work Free Estimates
Connor got one of the bedposts out of the back seat. Looking in from the bright sunlight, the shop floor was too dimly lit to make out any details at all, except when the blue-white light from an arc welder reflected off the corrugated walls like small flashes of lightning. Inside the bay doors, a short corridor led them to a musty office. A middle-aged woman was working at a computer behind a gray metal desk.
“Hi,” Connor said. “We called an hour ago about a bed—?”
“Oh, yes. Not many calls about beds. Best you talk to Nathan.” She came around the desk and led them onto the shop floor. A yellow and black stripe on the concrete marked some sort of OSHA borderline. “Why don’t you wait here?” She disappeared into the maze of machines.
Elly cast a sly glance at her husband. “You really like this, don’t you?”
Connor took a deep breath. “Ah, the smell of WD-40 in the morning. Hardware stores have the same effect.”
“So I married an aesthete who’s really a closet gearhead.” The woman returned with a man about her same age. “Nathan Reynolds,” the man said. He pulled off his gloves and shook Connor’s hand.
“Connor McKenzie. My wife, Elly.”
“Ma’am,” he said. “What do you have there? Looks like a bedpost. A brass-plated, sheet-metal reproduction?”
“Yeah, that’s right. The bolt plate here, the threads got stripped. My aunt says the bed used to sleep the grandchildren.”
Nathan took the bedpost over to a bench. Connor and Elly tagged after him. He examined the plate under a trouble light. He picked up a caliper and measured the diameter of the bolt holes.
“I was thinking of boring it out and tapping to three-eighths.
“Could do that,” Nathan said. “Except you’ve got five-sixteenths here already. This rolled steel is tough but soft. It can take a beating but won’t hold a thread.” He pondered the problem. “Here’s what I’d do. Take her to seven-sixteenths and insert a tapping sleeve.” He walked over to a shelf lined with small drawers and checked several till he found what he was looking for.
He handed one to Connor. Connor examined it and handed it to Elly. The gray metal was the size of a thimble, threaded inside and out. “Your basic carbon steel sleeve,” Nathan explained. “I guarantee that it will outlast the rest of the frame.”
Connor agreed. “It’s definitely the better solution.”
“So, four posts at three taps per plate?” He punched numbers into a calculator and scribbled the figures on a receipt pad.
Connor nodded. “When do you think you can have them done by?”
“We’re a little backed up at the moment. Should get to it by Thursday, latest. You got something to hold up the bed in the meantime?”
“Cinderblocks,” said Elly.
“Cinderblocks will do it,” the man said with a smile.
“Yes. They don’t wobble and they don’t fall down.”