He'd been carrying it for eleven days. A brass-colored piece, slightly bent, smaller than his thumb. It had fallen out of the desk when he was cleaning out the apartment, and he'd pocketed it without thinking, the way you pocket a coin or a button — something too small to set down deliberately.
The desk was his father's. Cherry veneer, three drawers on the right, one wide drawer across the top. The wide drawer hadn't closed properly in years. His father had mentioned it once, in passing, the way he mentioned everything — as a fact about the world, not a request. “Top drawer sticks.” And then he'd gone on eating his toast.
Now the apartment was empty and the desk was in Gavin's garage and the drawer still didn't close and the piece was in his pocket.
The hardware store was busy. Saturday morning. He stood near the entrance for a moment, next to a display of extension cords, feeling the piece between his finger and thumb.
A woman passed him on her way to the register. She was carrying a small package of picture hangers. At the counter, she said, “These,” and set them down, and the clerk rang them up. The woman paid with exact change. She knew how many hangers she needed and what size. She thanked the clerk and left.
Everything about it worked.
Gavin watched the door close behind her and felt the piece in his pocket and understood for the first time that his problem wasn't the hardware store. His problem was that he'd have to describe what was wrong, and he didn't have the words for it. The drawer sticks. The piece fell out. He'd be holding up a brass-colored thing smaller than his thumb and saying, “This was inside something.”
He waited until the line cleared. Then he went to the counter and set the piece down between them.
The clerk picked it up. Turned it once. “Cam lock,” she said. “The cam broke off. Aisle seven, about halfway down, left side. You want the fifteen-millimeter.”
He said thank you and went to aisle seven and found them hanging on a peg in a plastic blister pack, two to a pack. He held the pack next to the piece from his pocket. The one in the pack was the same shape, just whole. The broken part and the new part. He could see exactly where his piece had sheared off and what it was supposed to look like when it wasn't broken.
He bought two packs, because you don't go back for something this small.
At home, in the garage, he turned the desk around and found the hole where the cam lock seated. It took four minutes. He tightened the new one with a screwdriver, slid the drawer out, slid it back. It closed flush. The veneer met the frame without a gap.
He stood there with his hand on the closed drawer for longer than four minutes.
His father had lived with it broken. He could have come here and said “cam lock” and the clerk would have said “aisle seven” and it would have cost him three dollars and four minutes. But he hadn't, and Gavin didn't know why. Maybe he hadn't known the name. Maybe the name didn't matter enough to learn. Maybe the sticking drawer was just a fact about the world, the same as toast, the same as Tuesday.
Gavin put the extra pack in the desk's top drawer. It slid shut without effort. The small click of the catch was the loudest thing in the garage.
He still had the broken piece in his pocket. He left it there.