“How could I?”
“Ricky, I love you, but that’s cruel.” Looking in the rearview mirror, she slammed on the brakes and pulled over onto the narrow sandy shoulder.
“What are you doing?”
“Are you sure you want to do this? Because some things you can’t come back from, and I don’t want you to regret anything.”
Dense fog drifted over dunes as Sienna’s question swelled my brain, and though I already knew the answer—every bone in my body wanted to go back, take it back—I had made the right decision.
“Misurare due volte, tagliare una volta,” I said, thinking about Nonno, steady at his workbench in the shed behind our house on Blossom Avenue. How, when he was alive he would instruct me to sit on my hands so that I wouldn’t get myself into trouble. Twitching, itching to get dirty, to do what he did, sitting on them forced me to watch. To pay attention. To learn by example. He always took his time measuring, often going back two, three, four, five times, checking and triple-checking.
“Do it already!” I would say.
Laughing, he would shrug and “do it” as if on my command. His thick, callused hands moved effortlessly across wood grains.
“About time.” My feet bounced back and forth in anxious anticipation.
“Anything worth doing is worth your patience,” he said in his thick Italian accent. “What’s hard won’t be easy, and what’s right is never wrong.”
“Isn’t that kind of an obvious riddle?”
“Obvious?” He didn’t waver as he cut, but his eyebrow arched. “Seems that way, but what’s hard and right doesn’t come without careful consideration.” He finished his cut, blew the sawdust in the opposite direction, and admired his work. Then he handed what he was working on to me.
I turned it over in my hand, and I had zero idea what it was—a spindle for a chair, or a table?—but I loved it.
He grabbed my face, cupping both cheeks with both of his hands so he knew I was paying attention. I looked down and studied a deep, healed cut framed by scar tissue that stretched from his pointer finger across the fleshy pad to his thumb. I’d heard the story countless times, how, when he was a young kid, he was so eager to do what his father did that he took a saw not knowing how to use it and nearly lopped off his thumb. He used a wiggly noodle to demonstrate how it dangled from the tendons. Luckily, he regained near full use of it and used the pain to make him stronger, more focused until he honed his skills and became one of the best woodworkers around.
“Misurare due volte, tagliare una volta,” he said, then repeated for emphasis.
Measure twice, cut once.
He lightly smacked my face and sent me off to get him a glass of wine.
From Nonno, I learned to approach every cut, every decision from a place of information, logic, accuracy. It was paramount for a woodworker to not waste time and precious wood, and it became a mantra I used for everything: be prepared, thoughtful, and thorough before acting.
That was what I thought I was doing with Fielder Lemon.
When I got the letter that I was accepted as Christian Richards’s apprentice at Sawdust Woodworkers in Seattle, Washington, my first thought was that Nonno would be so proud of me. If I couldn’t learn directly under his tutelage, the way my father did, I would settle for the best-known craftsman in the States.
But my second thought, and nearly every thought that came after—Fielder. And my heart nearly stopped ticking.
What would happen to us? I went over it in my head a billion times: he was still in high school, had one more year to go, and it wouldn’t be fair to him to keep him on a string. I would be busy learning on the other side of the country, and I wanted him to have a fun last year, to enjoy his senior year the way I did. I thought if we stayed together, neither of us would be present enough, not the way we needed to be. My mom echoed this when she said, “Most high school relationships don’t work out,” despite the fact that she met Dad in high school and started dating him shortly after, and Nonno married Nonna in Italy at seventeen. She told me she wished she had gotten to experience more of life beforesettling.
That wordsettledin my brain, burrowed its way in, and steeped like tea.
If I’d asked Fielder to wait for me, he would have. That was how much he loved me. And I loved him too, too much to let him put his life on hold for me, or to spend his entire senior yearpreparing for a move to Seattle when he needed to think about what he wanted to do with his life. I didn’t want Fielder to delude himself into thinking being a Clock influencer could be a real career. He had to figure out what he really wanted, and he deserved that chance without me influencing him in any direction.
I agonized over what to do but couldn’t shake that we were moving in two different directions physically—geographically—even though we weren’temotionally. As someone who deals in measurements, living across the country from Fielder and having to figure out how to make a relationship work while he was still in high school and I was pursuing a brand-new path on my own seemed impractical. And in woodworking, there is no place for impracticality. I needed space to take care of me, to find myself on my own. It would have been too hard to do that while Fielder still needed me, even though I needed him, too. That was what I told myself, as my body screamed for Fielder, and I knew I was making a horrible mistake giving up on the best person in my life.
Fielder did nothing but love me, and I couldn’t love him hard enough to stay. I told him he needed to be more independent, that he never took care of me because he was so focused on his phone and building his Clock channel. But that was only partially true. Sure, he was on his phone too much, but he never stopped building me up and making time for me. I wanted him to do that for himself, too, the same way I wanted to see who I was without Fielder.
So I made him the wooden dream box and poured every ounce of love I had for him into carving its notches and assembling it, hoped that it would be enough for him to dream without me. Maybe in my absence, Fielder would learn what I had known my entire life: that he could thrive without me.
Maybe we would end up bringing each other down.
That was the seed of the story I started telling myself.
A text from Fielder came through as I mulled over Sienna’s question:
