Vernon’s Workbench in the Garage

The lights in the garage flicked on and off three times. That was the signal that Greta was going to bed. He could feel her looking at him through the window of the kitchen door. He didn’t look up.

Vernon flicked the light over his workbench twice to answer. That meant he was staying up a while to work on the toaster that wouldn’t give up its toast, it just kept toasting and toasting until you pulled the plug out of the wall and then went after the toast with a sharp knife. It had been irking him for months, having to do all that just for a piece of toast. Greta didn’t care. She ate coffee cake for breakfast.

Vernon had taken the toaster apart. His dad taught him how to do this, well, not fix a toaster, but how to take things that didn’t work completely apart and put them back together.

The toaster parts – the outside panels, the inside baking racks and all the little springs and levers – were spread out on the workbench in orderly piles like a kid would organize Legos before building a ship.

Vernon liked this part, the part where he could see all the inner workings of a thing, all the inside riddles laid bare on the table. No mystery here. Only mystery was what was broken and how to fix it. That could take hours. Vernon sat on his wood stool and pondered the parts.

Bertie the neighborhood cat leapt on to the workbench. He did this often, because Vernon kept the garage door open when he was working, and every time, Vernon would shoo him away, lift him up and drop him on the floor, but this time he didn’t. Bertie meowed, screeched almost, and Vernon was so startled that he jumped off his wood stool, knocking it over. Then he saw Bertie’s tail. It was mangled at the end, bloodied and bent, like it had been crushed by a tire or caught in a heavy door. Bertie paced back and forth over the toaster parts, dripping blood on the racks and the springs, while Vernon watched, not knowing what to do.

He wished he had gone to bed with Greta and then he wouldn’t know about the cat’s tail or have to do anything about it. No one would know if he shooed the cat outside and then closed the garage door. Was it his responsibility to take care of the cat just because he came in the garage with a ripped-up tail? To fix the cat like he was a toaster? He didn’t think so. He had his limits. He knew that so he wrapped the cat in a clean paint rag and took him inside to Greta who had been sleeping but turned to look at him when he turned on the bedroom light.

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Photo by Elmer Cañas on Unsplash