Chapter Text
“Hey, Mama?” Eric calls, picking his way down the basement steps into his mother’s workshop. Suzanne is sitting on her basket-weaving stool, surrounded by buckets of water-soaked reeds and caning, working on a commission -- hand-woven and hand-painted gift baskets for a wedding party of eight.
“Mmm?” She responds, looking up from her work while her hands keep on moving.
“I wanted to ask your help with something. It’s a present for Jack.” Eric finishes his descent and goes over to his mother’s worktable where he clears a small patch under one of Suzanne's swing arm lamps, setting the photograph of Frank and Vince down in its bright pool of light.
“What do you have there?” Suzanne sets the half-finished basket aside and wipes her hands on the backs of her jeans as she stands. She joins him at the table, leaning over to look at the photo he’s laid on the well-scarred wood. Eric resists the urge to snatch it up and tuck it back into the envelope where he’s been keeping it safe from harsh sunlight and prying eyes.
“Ooh, honey,” his mother coos the way she always does over a particularly good find, “aren’t they a find!”
“I was thinking to give it to Jack,” Eric says. “As a housewarming present. I found it out at the Pavilion. I was gonna buy it a frame but I’ve been thinking -- maybe I could do something a little different?”
“Did you have something particular in mind?” Suzanne picks the image up gingerly by the edges, turning the photo paper over to read the same penciled inscription Eric had sitting on his heels in the antique mall: Frank and Vince - Otswego - 1923.
“That’s what I wanted to ask you,” Eric explains. “I thought maybe a chair? Or a stool?”
“Hmm.” Suzanne lays the photograph back down and steps back from it, considering. “You just have the one, right? You’ll want it to have pride of place whatever you put it on.” She’s frowning, not unhappily, just in that abstracted way she does when she’s considering. “I know! I have just the thing!”
She disappears into the back corner where she keeps the larger pieces of furniture waiting for design ideas to take shape or for the right commission to come along. Eric listens to her rummaging around over the quiet hum of the audiobook she’s been streaming from the computer at her desk.
When his mother returns, she’s carrying a small cabinet with a little screen door on the front, visibly in need of repair, and two shelves just visible through the cloudy, tearing mesh.
“It’s a pie safe!” she says, grinning, when she sets it down in front of Eric. “It’s an awkward size -- a little too small for a coffee or end table, a little too tall to work well on a countertop, but --”
Eric grins, “-- but I could actually use it for pies! Mama, you’re a genius!” He crouches down to open the little door. In addition to the screen, the rusty hinges need replacing and the entire piece desperately needs a paint job or a fresh coat of varnish, maybe two. But the wood is essentially sound and the joins still good.
“Now you have a couple of options,” Suzanne says, crouching down next to him so she can illustrate with her hands like she prefers to do, “You’ll need to strip this and refinish it -- the state of the underlying wood will probably determine whether you can varnish or need to stick with paint -- and either way you’ll probably be stuck leaving the interior painted, unless you want to take the whole thing apart and reassemble. Now, I was thinking you could reconstruct the door with the photograph here,” she places a palm on the upper pane of the screen door, where the wire is starting to tear away from the frame. “But you could also choose to put it on the top.”
“I like the door idea,” Eric nods. He’s seen enough of Jack’s apartment over Skype, now, and the random snapshots Jack has a habit of sending throughout the day, that he has some ideas of where the pie safe might go. He can picture how the photograph, if they lacquer it to the top, would just end up under a stack of cookbooks. “So I need to start by stripping it--?” He still has an hour or two before he’ll need to ready himself to leave for work.
“Here, that’s best done outside. Let me help you take it out to the back patio…” Suzanne nudges him out of the way and together they pick up the pie safe and start maneuvering it out of the basement. As they wrestle the piece out of the basement, Eric thinks about sending a photo of it to Jack and then smiles to himself, deciding it will be more fun to make the gift a genuine surprise. One he knows Jack will love.
