Rick

The Secret Compartment###“What’s this, Mom?”###A hand no bigger than mine had been grasped a small, rough, wooden object, fished from the box of my mother’s few effects.###An object unfinished where I had been learning to file its ends, an object without the intended “secret” compartment that would have come later.###And if that compartment had been there, what would have been in it? A piece of my soul? Of my shattered childhood? Of a connection never quite made between “Dad” and “daughter?”###“It’s a box I was working on with one of my mother’s guys back when I was just a couple of years older than you.”###Such euphemisms! My mother — not a grandmother to my child she’d never met. Her guys — none of them my “Dad,” though that’s what I was taught to call each of them.###Mother had always started her relationships firm in the faith that the new “guy” would be “the” one. A worthy helpmeet, a White Knight, a perfect “Dad” for me. My biological “Dad” had in fact vanished long before I was born, and there were two “Dads” before George came along when I was in fifth grade. I repress the count of those who came after him.###George had come closest to being “Dad” for me. A carpenter, his credo was “if you know how to make something with your hands, you’ll never go hungry.” Wood was what he knew, so when he decided to teach me to make something with my hands, wood was the medium.###“We’ll make a tiny box with a secret compartment for your house-key (for I was a latch-key kid) and a slot for a quarter to call us if you need to, and a sliding lid with your name underneath where nobody can see it until they open the box, and…” George's enthusiasm was infectious, so even though only boys did carpentry, I got enthusiastic, too.###We worked during the spring holiday the year I was 12. I learned to use a compass and ruler to make the patterns on brown paper, and George showed me something called an angle square, laughing because “it can’t be angle and square at the same time!” With it, I plotted the pattern for the swinging lid.###I couldn’t yet use the sharp-toothed saws, but after George had roughed out the rounded ends of the box, and after we screwed the lid to the body, he taught me to use wood-files to finish smoothing the ends. “And, you see, the ends can be both flat and round at the same time, depending on how you look at them!###“Once they’re all smooth, we’ll work on the secret compartment!” George promised.######That’s when George disappeared from my life, killed at a pedestrian crossing. He was married, but not to my mother, and so his tools — the compass, the ruler, the angle square, the files, the saws, and everything, went back to her. ###And my mother soon found a new guy.###