“The house looks great,” said my father, rocking his heels on the cork floor. “In fact, it’s hard to imagine things were ever as bad as you say.”

My folks were in town for Thanksgiving, and Dad was on the family room side of the kitchen pass-through, trying to reconstruct a mental picture of the house he remembered.

But this was his first visit post-renovation — indeed, the first time he or my mom had crossed the threshold in 20 years — and because my wife and I have been stingy with photos, he couldn’t envision the squalor once described in this column. I thus directed him to the square pass-thru between us, now enlarged to three times its original size in the hopes of bringing in more light.

When my parents last lived here, the pass-through was flanked by hideous louvered shutters. And by the time we started renovations that fundamental hideousness had spread: several slats were irreparably busted and the portal itself looked onto splitting laminate countertops, pockmarked linoleum and a bank of dung-colored cabinets rotting on their hinges.

Now, though — as if to underscore the improvement — a single sunbeam bounced off the brim of my father’s coffee cup and across the speckled surface of the Corian counter toward the blond custom cabinets behind me. I daresay I couldn’t have written a timelier, more serendipitous event. Unfortunately, at that exact instant my father turned obliviously toward the patio door, redirecting the laser into my eye.

“At one time, that door was the crux of our contractor troubles,” I offered, dodging a second sunbeam, this one off the abandoned bathroom mirror in the yard. “Installation took almost six months, you know. And it’s still not really finished.”

I nodded at the trim, painted only with primer, and the unstained wood of the door itself, but Dad was someplace else. He slid the door along its track, unwittingly reflecting a third silvery ray with his wristwatch. This one caromed off the globe lights in the kitchen and ricocheted between the stove and the stainless steel faucet arching up from the sink before exploding in a blinding white supernova against all 33 polished-nickel cabinet-pulls at once.
“We still need curtains,” I said.

“Maybe so,” my father hummed. “But it’s still very livable.”

The entire room now aglow, progress and unfinished business sharing the spotlight, my father tapped a finger against the fake wood paneling and stared absently through the screen door, beyond the fallen mirror and the bare plot of last summer’s vegetable garden, at the pink camellia blossoms currently concealing the neighbor’s garbage. “I also expected the yard to look worse,” he said. “When you called it ‘a jungle’ I pictured weeds up to my eyeballs.”

“It was bad,” I insisted. “Between the poison ivy and the sticker vines, not to mention the stray cats…”

“But it’s not a jungle,” said my father.

“Not now,” I argued. “But it used to be the heart of darkness. In fact, when the final Fable comes out in December I’m tempted to use that as the title: ‘Heart of Darkness: Two and a Half Years of Home Improvement Horror in 600 Words.’”

He chuckled. “That’s kind of extreme, isn’t it?”

“Well, it’s either that, or some cheesy feel-good title designed to make everybody think the house is completely 100 percent finished, which it isn’t, and we all lived happily ever after, which nobody ever does.”

At this my father slid the door shut and re-examined the pass-thru. He furrowed his brow and traced a finger up the freshly painted trim. He pursed his professorial lips.

“This used to be a lot smaller,” he finally announced, as though I hadn’t already pointed out exactly that. “It’s amazing what a difference that makes. It really does bring in the light.”


Craig Brandhorst is a freelance writer. To read more  visit his blog at deconstructionfables.wordpress.com.