If you asked my grandfather about the desk he built, he would tell you that he used oak, the strongest and sturdiest tree to build furniture with. He might even bore you with the details of the light-colored stain he used or his decision to forgo the addition of any drawers or cabinets. None of these describe the most obvious quality of the desk — its sheer size. It’s fucking huge.

 

After twenty years in the Marine Corps and twenty-five in the state police, my grandfather did what most people with a shelf full of marksman’s trophies would do in retirement — consulting for a cell service company. In his later years in the police force, his role as head of communications gave him enough connections and experience in making legal agreements to qualify him as a “relationship builder.”

 

His new position allowed him to work from home, which meant he needed a new office space. No desks at retail stores were big enough for him. As an experienced craftsman, he took it upon himself to build his own — a 52” by 31” behemoth of a table that spanned nearly the entire wall of his office. His laptop looked like a deserted island in a sea of carefully collated papers and meticulously positioned desktop organizers. For most of my childhood, this desk remained in the upstairs of my grandparents’ house that I visited often. While its use fluctuated, I figured he was too proud of it to ever leave his home.

 

 

 

The summer before I left for college, my grandmother died. The death of our family’s matriarch affected our family in many expected ways. Tension built from the stress of logistics following someone’s passing, much of which my mother took care of; dynamics between family members changed permanently, and at least for a season, our family grew closer.

 

It also presented itself in less predictable ways. One of these was my grandfather’s attempt to clear out the house, specifically the desk. Logistically, it didn’t make much sense. Just to get it out of his office would be a two-person pain of a job, but to get it down the stairs, into a car, then into a new home seemed even more ridiculous.

 

Despite this, my grandfather was set on moving it, and the person he asked to take the desk was my mom. His alternative was offering it to my uncle as a work table for his shed, a truly terrible bluff. It was unlikely he would want it, and even if he did, the desk would collect dust in my grandpa’s house for months before my uncle got around to transporting it. Out of equal parts guilt and love, my mom agreed to take it.

 

“Papa is going to be here in 30 minutes.” Through the phone, I felt my mom tearing her hair from its roots, it floating to the floor like dandelion seeds in the wind. Marine-Corps time indicated we had about 15 minutes to prepare for my grandpa’s arrival. My lucid daydream of lying on the grass in the the August sun with friends who would soon leave for their respective colleges was interrupted.

 

I came home to my mom’s body and mouth moving as quickly as the hummingbirds that the squirrels scattered away outside. She took on her father’s role as a state police sergeant for a moment, improvising ways to barricade us from his judgement. Preventing the door to her office from fully opening was a tenured bookcase, its age and status shown by the imprints it left on the carpet and its decades’ worth of how-to books my mom had collected to reflect her many hobbies. Marching out with the bookshelf was a fold-up table, both of which were directed to hide outside what would be my grandpa’s line of sight.

 

In a rare instance of tardiness, my grandpa arrived just as the windows were cleaned and the dust had settled. I don’t remember how the desk inside or up the stairs; what I do remember is what happened once we got it to the door of its new post. Despite our speed and strategy in moving furniture out of the room, it was going to be a tight fit.

 

“We need the table standing upright, Melissa.”

 

The table was a refrigerator with legs made of 3-by-3s. No amount of tetris-turning was going to get it through the door, one that felt like a mousehole with the desk standing in front of it.

 

“Melissa, we need the legs facing the left.”

 

His southern drawl that my mom tried so hard to shake as an adolescent grew resigned. Her already exasperated tone became frustrated, taking an almost rebellious attitude she may have been afraid to use under his roof. The table hadn’t shrunk in the span of an hour. The only thing that had shrunk was my grandpa’s patience with the desk and my mom’s patience with her father.

 

As our efforts became increasingly ridiculous, a strange shift occurred — now my mother was the one intent on getting the desk in. My grandfather’s admission of defeat was the breaking point.

 

“You could take the door off, but even then, I don’t think it would fit.”

 

Mom snapped — but not in the way most children would snap at their parents. My mother was raised to say “yes sir” and “yes ma’am.” Justice in the King-Vipperman household was certainly punitive. Her retaliation would be calculated.

 

She doesn’t curse often. When she does, it’s usually more melodramatic than anything. She makes it sounds quaint, almost like a caricature of an angry woman. But when my mom said, “I’m gonna get this fucking desk in this fucking room,” after her dad left, I certainly believed her.

 

My grandpa had left, but my mom was just getting started. We twisted the table in every position we had tried only moments ago. After an indiscernible amount of time, the only thing that changed was the door’s hinges, now swinging like a saloon’s entrance. Then she had her epiphany, her battle plan for defeating her dad. Forty-five years of a father’s doubt wears on a woman.

 

 

 

“Would a sawzall work?” I don’t think my experience with woodworking surpassed my mother’s; I had no answers to give. The person who could actually help, my father, was out of town. He could have told her what would work, but he would also be the only one to try and talk her down from doing something rash. She was too invested — the stakes were too high to turn back.

 

We sat cross-legged in the hallway, bookended by the desk and unattached door. A woodworking pencil and measuring tape lie in front of us. I reaffirmed her that her idea could work if she had the right tools; I also assured her that I didn’t think she was crazy. This was a lie — it was an insane thing to do, but I had no room to judge her. We’re a family of crazy people, but as long as we’re tolerant of each other’s quirks, everything seems to work out.

 

I left the house the next morning before I got a chance to speak to my mom. We share the tendency to get incredibly angry, even spiteful, for a day or two before burning ourselves out on self-righteousness, usually ending up feeling a bit embarrassed. This makes for a great dynamic when our anger isn’t directed at each other — we hear the other out, let them be angry, and convince them to not do anything rash for a few hours. I figured she’d be over it by time I returned, though I still don’t know what we would have done with the desk.

 

I came home to discover she had followed through with her plan. An amputated leg lied unattended on the carpet. The stub that was left had the dust of a fresh cut. The field medic’s tools rested on the floor unsanitized.

 

“Ready for the moment of truth?”

 

While she claims both parties were losers in this fight, for the moment, Mom won. We held the desk up with the emotion of a track runner assisting a broken-legged competitor across the finish line. My mom tended to the wound, reattaching the limb with a surgeon’s attention to both aesthetics and functionality. The side of the once-broken leg was positioned in the far corner of the room, no more of an inconvenience than wearing long pants to cover a scar.

 

 

 

I had no problem lying to my grandpa about it the next day.

 

“Yep! We just had to take the door off and shuffle it around a bit.”

 

Much to her benefit, my mother couldn’t do the same. She didn’t tell him outright, but she couldn’t deny his admittedly impressive guess of her method. He came over and inspected the table with the same attention he may have given to her high-school report cards decades ago. After a few long minutes of scrutiny, he saw the scar.

 

“You know, I have some stuff at the house that would smooth this right up. I can run and grab it right now. It’d only take me a few minutes.”

 

Her victory was both fleeting, and apparently, inconsequential. She claims the gray hairs she grew and jigsaw she bought weren’t worth it. I didn’t know it then, but I happened to be caught in the crossfire of just one in a lifetime of father-daughter battles. Mom emerged weary and covered in sawdust, but in my eyes, she emerged a victor.