April 11th 2020

Chapter 102
Their Sounds of Repair

In all those months he had spent going through his grandfather`s old house, sorting through items to keep or give away or simply throw out, Lucas had been left to make a lot of decisions. At first he would ask Pappy Joe whether he wanted him to keep anything, or if he wanted to get back any of it. His grandfather would maintain, every time, that he had gotten from the house every item he wished to hold on to. The rest was for Lucas to decide on, which he joked was his way of not having to deal with the clean-up. For the most part, Lucas and his helpers had sorted through everything and dealt with it. There were just a few items he had held on to for one reason or another and put away in a rented storage space. Some were objects that had some sentimental value, whether he cared to admit it or not. Others were things that… well… he might have wanted to hold on to, for the days when he and Maya had kids… And other items were just one big hodge podge of a category, something like 'the broken and the potentially useful.'

"Right here, this is it," he called back, leading Maya and Sam toward a large, covered object. Pulling back the cover, the object was revealed to be a tall wardrobe.

"Woah…" Maya blinked.

"Holy Narnia…" Sam responded much the same way, making his sister snort back to reality.

"Is this another piece of your great grandfather's?" Maya asked Lucas, coming up to inspect the piece.

"Careful, the doors are broken, the hinges," he explained. "But yeah, it is. Considered keeping it around at first, having Aunt Dot fix it, restore it, but we already had the one in our room, this was my dad's." Maya turned back to him, a question in her eyes and maybe half a smile, too. "No, I don't know how he broke it."

"Don't think for a second that this is going to be the end of my investigation," she told him as she turned back to the wardrobe. "She's going to love it," she smiled. "If we can fix it."

The three of them worked together, carefully bringing their wooden patient from its place. The doors had been held in place, carefully, when the wardrobe had first been removed from the house. It had taken Lucas, Bishop, and Dylan together to get it out of the room, and down the stairs, and into the truck, which didn't leave this new trio too encouraged over the transport this time around. But they'd called in assistance, in the form of the Emmetts, senior and junior. Lucas' uncle and cousin helped him and the Harts as they got the wardrobe and transported it over to Dot's shop. They might have had it brought to the house, but then it would have ruined the surprise, seeing as the item's future owner was presently bunking on their living room couch.

In the spirit of renewal, Lucas had gotten the idea of refurbishing the wardrobe and gift it to Ramona, for her newly single apartment. Now all they had to do was fix the doors, give the whole thing a new bit of shine… The day had presented itself, so they'd set out to get it done. It had just been Lucas and Maya at first, but Sam found out what they were up to and offered his help at once, so here they were.

"Oh, would you look at this…" Dot came up to have a look at the wardrobe as it was carried into the back of the shop, where she worked. She inspected it with the eyes of someone with that skill, that craft, in her blood. "This one is older than yours," she turned to her nephew and his fiancée.

"Really?" Lucas stepped up to try and see what she saw, even as Maya and Sam approached, too. "Does that mean we can't…"

"No, of course not," Dot smiled. "You just give me a shout if you're unsure about anything. I'll be over there, finishing up an order that has to go out tomorrow morning. You have everything you need," she pointed out the things she'd set out for them ahead of their arrival, turning a nod to Maya, who would know what needed to be done well enough by now.

So, the three of them got started. The doors were removed, the Hart siblings taking one each to start restoring, while Lucas inspected the hinges, which would need replacing.

"Any more deliveries?" Dora came sweeping into the back shop minutes later, twirling a keychain around her index, likely holding the keys to the shop van. The seventeen-year-old girl hardly looked the type to deliver sometimes heavy looking pieces of wooden furniture or decoration, but she was stronger than she appeared and possibly enjoyed proving people's assumptions wrong a whole lot. "Hey!" she smiled, noticing the trio working over the wardrobe. "What are you doing here?"

"It's a present, for a friend," Lucas explained, indicating the pieces.

"This was at your house, I remember it," Dora declared. The way she looked at everything, she looked so much like her mother. "Can I help?"

"Yeah, actually, want to take a look at the feet here?" Lucas indicated the bottom of the wardrobe.

"Sure," his cousin replied, digging an elastic band from her pocket and going about twisting her long hair into a great big frizzy mess of a bun. "Did you look at the bottom yet?" she asked as she crouched and then knelt down to inspect the feet.

"The what?" Lucas blinked. Maya and Sam both looked just as confused. Dora sat up again, staring at the trio with some amusement.

"That's a no then," she declared. "It was like his signature, on pieces like this, to have this sort of… hidden compartment." Frowning as she felt around at the underside of the wardrobe, Dora smiled and stopped, motioning for Lucas to come and join her. "Find my hand," she instructed, so he did. She pulled hers away. "Do you feel it? Like a groove, a cut."

"Yeah…" he paused.

"Good, now just push up like a quarter inch and twist counter clockwise until it releases," Dora instructed.

Lucas did as told, while Maya, Sam, and Dot all stood by and watched, inevitably curious. When the panel released, he gasped with surprise at the sudden weight. He pulled the lot out from under the wardrobe to find the panel – roughly the size of a magazine – and the contents of the hidden compartment, which turned out to be an old spiral bound notebook. The cover was a mess of stickers, and pen drawings, giving the distinct impression of having belonged to a high school student.

"This was in your father's room?" Maya turned to Lucas, trying not to grin, imagining what it might contain. Before he could reply, Dot just laughed.

"That's Tom's alright, I gave him that one sticker there," she pointed to the corner, where Batman prowled mysteriously next to a baseball player in mid swing. They could make out that the cover must have been a bright yellow in the beginning, and Lucas knew instantly that his father had gone out of his way to rid himself of this, out of a noted distaste for the color yellow but also a lack of pickiness at taking what he could get his hands on and using it.

"What is it?" Sam wondered.

"It's… his… so he gets to decide," Lucas decided, rising to set the hidden treasure aside. Had his father forgotten it was there?

"This is amazing…" Maya was all wonder, using her phone to get a look under the wardrobe and see the now open compartment. It wouldn't have held vast amounts of objects, but it was still big enough to be useful. "Wait," she sat up now, looking back to Dora. "Are you saying…" The girl grinned.

"I spotted the ones on your pieces back when we were working on them, but I didn't want to say anything, it's always more fun if you start finding them by accident, but since you're giving this one away, I thought you should know so you could see if there was something inside. I didn't look inside yours, I swear."

"Is it bad that I really want to run home and look now?" Maya chuckled. Looking back to Lucas, he seemed to be right on the same page as her.

As intrigued as they all were now, about Thomas Friar's notebook, about the compartments and their potential contents, they had come here today with one goal, and that was to restore the wardrobe for Ramona, so they got to work. The cover was put back in place underneath, and little by little everything was seen to. As they waited to apply second coats to still drying elements, the four sat outside the shop, getting some air and a late lunch.

"The place where you're playing tomorrow night, can I come even if I'm underage?" Dora asked Maya.

"Yeah, of course," Maya nodded. "Sam's coming, Cecilia, too. I can get you and Adam in, no problem."

"Oh, just me, it's fine," Dora shrugged, picking at her BLT.

"He can't come?"

"No, we broke up." She said it so plainly, which must have made the surprise on the rest of their faces seem borderline comical.

"When did that happen?" Sam asked of his friend.

"Last night," Dora told him. "We were talking about college, he said he wanted to go away, leave Texas, and I said I didn't, and we didn't think long distance would work for us, so we decided to end it now, before things got weird and we couldn't even be friends anymore." She looked around at all of them. "It's fine, really. We realized we might actually be better that way, nothing has to change. Anyway, we're trying to do our own things right now, and I know he's going to be hanging out with his friends from the football team tomorrow, so he wouldn't have come anyway."

"I… I'll get you the ticket," Maya told her, and Dora smiled, getting back to her sandwich.

None of them had said a word on this amicable break, or on the mystery notebook, as they got back to work on the wardrobe. They finished the work and left it at the shop, where they'd pick it up when the time came to transport it to Ramona's place. Maya, Lucas, and Sam returned home, unable to pretend as though the first thing they wanted to do wasn't to seek out those compartments on their own furniture. Every piece they had which was made by one of Lucas' family members was inspected, and each one sooner or later had its secret space discovered and opened. Most of them were found empty, which was only partially disappointing, as they were now left with the idea of what they might put within those spaces…

The one they found to contain something was in fact the drawing desk that Dot had made for Maya as an early wedding present. She had carried on the tradition, though they couldn't say for sure if she'd only done it here, to match the rest, or if it was on all the pieces like this one. Inside, she'd hidden what was soon identified as another wedding present. This one was wrapped, and had a small card attached, with express instructions not to unwrap if this was found before the wedding. With a sigh, it had been returned to hide until the following summer.

"Imagine if you didn't find it until like fifty years from now," Sam had laughed, heading out of the attic to find the barking Archer. After he was gone, Maya had turned to Lucas. From the look on his face, she'd guess he had the same concern brewing at the back of his mind. Knowing the history between Sam and Dora, the poor unfortunate crush of the previous year, they couldn't help but worry about potential trouble ahead, now that Dora was no longer attached. Sam and Cecilia were solid, they were, and they couldn't imagine either Sam or Dora doing anything to jeopardize this, but what if… what if…

TO BE CONTINUED

See you tomorrow! - mooners