The Last Thing He Told Me

I unfold the paper.

Owen’s note is short. One line, its own puzzle.

Protect her.

Greene Street Before It Was Greene Street

I met Owen a little over two years ago.

I was still living in New York City then. I was living three thousand miles from Sausalito, the small Northern California town that I now call home. Sausalito is on the other side of the Golden Gate from San Francisco, but a world away from city life. Quiet, charming. Sleepy. It’s the place that Owen and Bailey have called home for more than a decade. It is also the polar opposite of my previous life, which kept me squarely in Manhattan, in a lofted storefront on Greene Street in SoHo—a small space with an astronomical rent I never quite believed I could afford. I used it as both my workshop and my showroom.

I turn wood. That’s what I do for work. People usually make a face when I tell them this is my job (however I try to describe it), images of their high school woodshop class coming to mind. Being a woodturner is a little like that, and nothing like that. I like to describe it as sculpting, but instead of sculpting clay, I sculpt wood.

I come by the profession naturally. My grandfather was a woodturner—an excellent one, at that—and his work was at the center of my life for as far back as I can remember. He was at the center of my life for as far back as I can remember, having raised me mostly on his own.

My father, Jack, and my mother, Carole (who preferred that I refer to her as Carole), were largely uninterested in doing any childrearing. They were largely uninterested in anything except my father’s photography career. My grandfather encouraged my mother to make an effort with me when I was young, but I barely knew my father, who traveled for work 280 days a year. When he did have time off, he hunkered down at his family’s ranch in Sewanee, Tennessee, as opposed to driving the two hours to my grandfather’s house in Franklin to spend time with me. And, shortly after my sixth birthday, when my father left my mother for his assistant—a woman named Gwendolyn who was newly twenty-one—my mother stopped coming home as well. She chased my father down until he took her back. Then she left me with my grandfather full-time.

If it sounds like a sob story, it isn’t. Of course, it isn’t ideal to have your mother all but disappear. It certainly didn’t feel good to be on the receiving end of that choice. But, when I look back now, I think my mother did me a favor exiting the way she did—without apology, without vacillation. At least she made it clear: There was nothing I could have done to make her want to stay.

And, on the other side of her exit, I was happier. My grandfather was stable and kind and he made me dinner every night and waited for me to finish dinner before he announced it was time to get up and read me stories before we went to sleep. And he always let me watch him work.

I loved watching him work. He’d start with an impossibly enormous piece of wood, moving it over a lathe, turning it into something magical. Or, if it was less than magical, he would figure out how to start over again.

That was probably my favorite part of watching him work: when he would throw up his hands and say, “Well, we’ve got to do this different, don’t we?” Then he’d go about finding a new way into what he wanted to create. I’m guessing any psychologist worth her salt would say that it must have given me hope—that I must have thought my grandfather would help me do the same thing for myself. To start again.

But, if anything, I think I took comfort in the opposite. Watching my grandfather work taught me that not everything was fluid. There were certain things that you hit from different angles, but you never gave up on. You did the work that was needed, wherever that work took you.

I never expected to be successful at woodturning—or at my foray from there into making furniture. I half expected I wouldn’t be able to make a living out of it. My grandfather regularly supplemented his income by picking up construction work. But early on, when one of my more impressive dining room tables was featured in Architectural Digest, I developed a niche among a subset of downtown New York City residents. As one of my favorite interior designers explained it, my clients wanted to spend a lot of money decorating their homes in a way that made it look like they weren’t spending any money at all. My rustic wood pieces helped with their mission.

Over time, this devoted clientele turned into a somewhat larger clientele in other coastal cities and resort towns: Los Angeles, Aspen, East Hampton, Park City, San Francisco.

This was how Owen and I met. Avett Thompson—the CEO of the tech firm where Owen worked—was a client. Avett and his wife, the ridiculously gorgeous Belle, were among my most loyal clients.

Belle liked to joke that she was Avett’s trophy wife, which may have been funnier if it also wasn’t so on point. She was a former model, ten years younger than his grown children, born and raised in Australia. My pieces were in every room of her town house in San Francisco (where she and Avett lived together) and her newly constructed country house in St. Helena, a small town on the northern end of Napa Valley where Belle tended to retreat alone.

I had met Avett only a handful of times before he and Owen showed up at my workshop. They were in New York for an investor meeting and Belle wanted them to stop by to check on a rolled-edge side table she’d asked me to make for their bedroom. Avett wasn’t sure what he should be checking for, something about how the table would look with the bed frame—the bed frame that would hold their ten-thousand-dollar organic mattress.

Avett couldn’t have cared less, honestly. When he and Owen walked in, he was in a sharp blue suit, his graying hair crunchy with hair gel, the phone glued to his ear. He was in the middle of a phone call. He took one look at the side table and briefly covered the mouthpiece.

“Looks fine to me,” he said. “We good here?”

Then, before I answered, he headed outside.

Owen, on the other hand, was mesmerized. He did a slow sweep of the whole workshop, stopping to study each piece.

I watched him as he walked around. He was such a confusing picture: This long-limbed guy with shaggy blond hair and sun-drenched skin, in worn-out Converse sneakers. All of which seemed at odds with his fancy sports jacket. It was almost like he fell off a surfboard into the jacket, the starched shirt beneath it.

I realized I was staring and started to turn away just as Owen stopped in front of my favorite piece—a farm table that I used as a desk.

My computer and newspapers and small tools covered most of it. You could only make out the table beneath if you were really looking. He was. He took in the stiff redwood that I had chiseled down, gently yellowing the corners, welding rough metal to each edge.

Was Owen the first customer to notice the table? No, of course not. But he was the first to bend down, just like I’d often do, running his fingers along the sharp metal and holding the table there.

He turned his head and looked up at me. “Ouch,” he said.

“Try bumping up against it in the middle of the night,” I said.

Owen stood back up, giving the table a tap goodbye. Then he walked over to me. He walked over to me until somehow we were standing close to each other—too close, really, for me not to wonder how we’d gotten there. I probably should have felt self-conscious about my tank top and paint-splattered jeans, the messy bun on top of my head, my unwashed curls falling out of it. I felt something else though, watching him look at me.