She Uses Her Space (SUSH) — Chapter 2.5: A Father’s Worry

“A father doesn’t need to see inside her SPACE to know it holds more than she shows.”

[Daichi’s POV]

My workshop is only a room and a half if you count the draft under the door as extra space, but it smells like the things I understand —metal warmed by hand, lamp oil, the faint sting of solder. I had the lantern…

…propped on a crate and the contraption spread out under its light, a cross between a pump and a jellyfish: copper tubes blooming from a central canister, rubber gasket clenched like stubborn lips. It’s meant to lift water without a proper power source. It is also meant to stop leaking. Two ambitions wrestle there every evening.

When I was Lara’s age, my SPACE looked like this workshop, only neater and emptier. A storeroom the size of a pantry: shelves, a workbench, a row of dull tools politely arranged. Other boys had training courts and orchards and one showy idiot had a reflecting pool where his own face stared back like destiny. I had a hammer, a file, and a door that no one asked to see twice. The teasing was gentle compared to what I’ve heard now—“plain as a bucket,” “you’ll make a fine assistant”—but it sticks anyway, the way burrs cling to a pant leg even after you think you brushed them off.

You learn to build dignity from plain parts. You learn to keep turning the wrench when the nut squeals, to keep polishing even when the metal will never shine enough to suit the guilds. When adulthood came, the teasing softened into forgetting. No one remembers the boy with the bucket if the man fixes their hinge without charging extra. Sometimes that is enough.

The gasket burped. I wiped my hands on a rag and reached for the pliers. Outside, the house had its evening sounds: my wife rinsing bowls, the soft murmur of radio news through the wall, footsteps overhead as Lara crossed the hall to her room. She moves lighter these days, careful like a cat. That’s how you hear secrets, in what people don’t let their feet tell the floor.

I’d watched her at dinner, the way she flinched when her mother frowned at the bean jar. We’re not counting coins at the bottom of a well, but beans don’t replace themselves. She offered a sheepish lie that didn’t fit her mouth and I let it slide because I still remember the weight of being sixteen—of wanting room to try something without a verdict marching in behind it. My wife pinged her civic band during supper to remind her to wash up after, and Lara pretended not to feel it until the third knock. Kids think parents don’t notice that delay, but we do.Official source: betwix.co/litenovel — © JL Chee

The pliers slipped and bit my knuckle. “Ah.” I stuck the cut in my mouth out of habit. Blood tastes like pennies no matter what space you’re in.

“Talking sweet to the pump again?” my wife said from the doorway. She had loosened her apron and tied her hair up in a knot that always makes me think of neat bundles of rope.

“It only listens when I lie,” I said. “Which says something unflattering about at least one of us.” She stepped around the crate and looked down at the mess with a practiced, polite interest—the way she looks at weather maps or other people’s babies.

“You’ve given it more guts since morning.”

“Guts are easy. Keeping them from spilling is the work.”

She arched an eyebrow. “Said every father since rain learned to fall.” I grinned despite myself. She has a way of slipping a smile into a room and making it look like it was there all along. She reached out and straightened a spanner on the bench that had wandered away from its brothers, then let her fingers tap loosely on the wood.

“She’s hiding something,” she said, without preface.

“The beans,” I offered.

“That’s part of it.” She tipped her head. “And my twine went missing, and a length of old curtain I kept for shade-cloth. And a dozen of your nails, which I counted when I cleaned the windowsill and which are now… saints knows where. And she doesn’t answer my band pings until the third knock.”

“She brought some back,” I said. “Left them on the rack like a child returning stolen cookies to the jar and hoping it resets time.”

“She’s trying,” she said. Not accusing. Not forgiving. Naming. That’s her gift. “Our daughter is trying something.” I turned the canister to inspect the seam.

“Do we stop her?” She leaned her hip against the bench, looking not at me, but at the lantern flame as if it had an opinion to offer.

“Do you wish your father had stopped you every time you took something apart to see how it worked?”

“My father wished,” I said. “He also wished for a son with a vineyard in his ribs and a river in his head.”

“And he got a storeroom,” she said, not unkindly. “And a good man.” I let that sit. The lamp hissed. Outside, someone’s scooter coughed and died and was sworn at with affection.

“When I was her age,” I said, “we had the same rows of desks. The same breathwork. Fewer screens to argue with us. A boy in my year took a wrench to his projection—did I tell you that? His SPACE showed up like a humped little barn—useful, honest, ugly—and he hurled a wrench at the arch as if it were the mirror’s fault. The overseers had to close the hall for a day. We laughed about it for a week and then forgot his name.”

“You never forget your own,” she said.

“No,” I agreed. “You don’t.” We stood without speaking for a while. The pump gleamed at me, slightly malicious. Somewhere above us, a floorboard sang and then went quiet. In my mind I saw my daughter’s hands, ink on the side of her thumb where she rests her pen, dirt in the creases no matter how she scrubs. I have made things with less.

“She doesn’t bruise like you did,” my wife said softly, surprising me. “You took the jokes and kept them in your heart for years. Lara… she files them into parts. Decide what can be used.”

“That’s your side of the family,” I said. “I would have thrown the wrench.”

“She might yet,” my wife said. “But first she’ll see if it can be a lever.” We smiled at the same time, and that felt like having our names on the same page again.

Much later, after the lamp was doused and the house’s wood had cooled, I found myself still awake. The hum of the district pressed faintly through the shutters—distant scooters, the hollow rattle of late trams, the shuffle of neighbors closing rooftop allotments above. My wife shifted beside me, her breathing even. I thought of my father again, how he once told me: ‘Plain tools make plain men.’ I’ve spent a lifetime arguing with that sentence in the language of rivets and repairs. Now my daughter is arguing with it too, in soil and threads.

I remembered being nineteen, carrying my first rig to market—a clumsy siphon with half its valves borrowed from a neighbor’s trash. The guild clerk inspected it, stamped his slate, and paid me in credit. A week later, the servers crashed and the number vanished like smoke. All I had left was the screenshot of my first sale. I kept it for years, proud as if it meant something, but a picture doesn’t pay for bread. Coin doesn’t vanish, but credit does. Lara will have to learn that too, sooner than I’d like.

The pump gleamed up at me like a stubborn question. I swapped the gasket for a thinner one, tightened the band, and worked the handle. The pump made a sound like a person deciding not to complain. A thin thread of water climbed the tube and then recoiled when it saw how far it had to go. Progress, of a kind. The sort that doesn’t make good stories but builds good lives.

On the shelf above the bench, a little jar held the odd screws, washers, and failed rivets of the last decade—my private museum of almosts. I tipped three nails into it without thinking, then took them back out and tucked them into the pocket on the apron hook. Some things you keep ready at hand because your child’s hands will come looking.

In my mind I saw Lara’s SPACE the way the overseers did—thin beds, a small pond, a rack of tired tools—and the way I had seen it once, when she offered me a shy look that meant I was allowed: the soil a shade darker than ordinary, the air tasting slightly green, a corner where a rack of tools leaned as if to tell a secret. It is small, yes. So is the seed before it becomes a tower’s worth of wood. People forget that you can make height out of narrowness. They forget stairs exist until there is a fire. My daughter has always been good at stairs. Official source: betwix.co/litenovel — © JL Chee

“A small house can hold big hearts,” I told the pump, the nails, the lamp, and the room that knows more of me than anyone alive. Saying it out loud made it truer. I doused the lamp and let the dark knit itself together again. On my way to the door I paused and slid three nails farther back on the rack, out of sight but easy to reach. If our girl was braiding a rope, I would not cut it. I would hold the end while she tied.

When I stepped into the hall, the house breathed the quiet of families who are not finished yet, who have more to mend than to mourn. I thought of my storeroom boyhood and my daughter’s balcony garden and the way a pump learns water by failing at it first. The world is not kind by default; you have to teach it where to soften.

She will surprise us, I thought, and felt the hopeful thud of it like a nail set true with one clean strike.

[End of Chapter 2.5]

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She Uses Her Space (SUSH): Chapter 2.5 – A Father’s Worry | Light Novel

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