Red Handle

The Habit

Chapter 54: Red Handle

The kitchen drawer at Morrow started sticking the week before Thanksgiving.

Not dramatically. Just enough that it required a second pull and a short, irritated exhale every time Renee reached for silverware.

"I realize this is not a catastrophe," she said on the phone Wednesday night. "But if I have to negotiate with cutlery one more time, I may become a theological problem."

Noel came over after work.

Lila was at the table making place cards for a school feast using too much glitter and not enough respect for drying times. The drawer in question sat below the counter to the right of the stove, a narrow wooden thing with runners original to the duplex and therefore based on an older national confidence about friction.

He pulled it once. Again.

The left runner had loosened. One screw backed out just enough to let the drawer toe inward at the wrong angle.

"Nothing mortal," he said.

"That's the kindest thing anyone has said to this kitchen."

He opened the tool drawer he'd helped Renee assemble from a coffee can, a biscuit tin, and the small collection of essentials every occupied house eventually accumulates.

The red-handled screwdriver was there.

He had brought it over on no declared principle weeks ago after realizing it did more good in a house with active drawers than in the solemnity of his own kitchen drawer beside cleaner tools and worse reasons.

He held it a second before using it.

The melt scar near the neck was still there. The handle still worn smooth where another man's hand had once made repetition into habit. No light broke through the clouds. No music cue announced inheritance arriving in a better form. It was only a screwdriver in the wrong decade and the right room.

He set the tip to the screw and tightened.

The drawer aligned. The slide improved. One more adjustment to the rear bracket and it ran clean.

"Try it now."

Renee opened it. Closed it. Opened it again with exaggerated reverence.

"I would like to thank modern science and your inability to mind your own business."

Lila looked up from the glitter cards.

"Was it the red one."

"Yeah," Noel said.

"Good," she said, returning to the card marked MS. LANDERS with enough glitter to compromise legibility. "That one looks like it knows family secrets."

Renee laughed once, then looked at the screwdriver in Noel's hand and let the laughter settle.

"You all right?" she asked.

He thought about it honestly.

"Yeah."

He was. The tool had become matter without becoming shrine, a difference he would not have trusted five years ago and now found himself grateful to witness at arm's length.

After supper he stayed long enough to help Lila print EDNA in block letters on a place card because Edna, she said, deserved a card with upright posture.

Back on Linden he washed the glitter from his hands with the kitchen faucet running steady and untroubled.

Then he sat at the table with the second notebook open.

Put Elton's old red-handled screwdriver to work tonight on a kitchen drawer in Renee's duplex and found out that usefulness can survive a man without turning him into a saint. The drawer closes properly now, which is more than most histories get to say. Lila says the screwdriver looks like it knows family secrets, and for once I did not feel obligated to argue with a child to keep the room from telling the truth in its own tone.