The Things We Repair
Copyright© 2026 by Flubu
Chapter 11: Home Is a Verb
Fog covered the farm before sunrise.
It softened the fence lines, erased the far feed field, and reduced the forest around Takuhai to layers of grey. Sound travelled strangely through it. Daniel could hear the cattle shifting in the shelter before he could see the building, and the low engine note of the feed tractor seemed to come from every direction at once.
He had just finished checking the heated water trough when Neris emerged from the mist carrying two mugs.
“Coffee,” she said, offering him one.
Daniel accepted it with suspicion. “You don’t drink coffee.”
“This one is yours. Mine is tea.”
“Good. For a second I thought Earth had finally broken you.”
ER’s voice came from the communicator at Neris’s collar, relayed from Takuhai. “The pilot remains functionally intact. Repeated exposure to local beverages has altered her threat assessment.”
Neris looked down at the device. “I no longer classify tea as suspicious.”
“Coffee remains under investigation.”
Daniel drank. The coffee was exactly the strength he made for himself.
He looked at Neris over the rim. “You did this?”
“ER provided the ratio.”
“I constructed a preference model,” ER said.
“That’s a complicated way to say you remembered.”
“The distinction may be socially relevant but computationally unnecessary.”
Daniel smiled into the mug. “Thanks, both of you.”
Neris’s ears lifted at the inclusion.
The day’s first repair involved nothing from another universe. A line of maple rounds had been left beside the lean-to since spring. With colder weather approaching and Takuhai’s small heater now part of their evenings, Daniel wanted the wood split and stacked before snow buried the work area.
They spent the morning beside the splitter. Daniel operated the ram while Neris carried the pieces and arranged the rows. Fog beaded along her whiskers and condensed on the white fur above her eyes. Each time she bent to place a log, her tail lifted clear of the mud with meticulous care.
Neris approached the woodpile as a load-distribution problem. She aligned the first row, tested it, adjusted the end pieces, and rebuilt a section Daniel considered complete.
“Most people stop when the wood isn’t falling over,” he said.
“That threshold is inadequate.”
“It’s firewood, not a bridge.”
“Poorly stacked fuel becomes wet fuel. Wet fuel produces incomplete combustion. Incomplete combustion produces smoke.”
“And smoke?”
“Grounds the pilot.”
ER interrupted. “I appreciate the recognition that poor firewood management can have serious consequences for a grounded aviator.”
Daniel closed his eyes. “Was that a pun?”
“Yes.”
“It needs work.”
“Humour is a developing subsystem.”
The rating system did not yet exist, but Daniel could feel one becoming necessary.
As the pile grew, Daniel repeatedly took the larger rounds.
Neris noticed on the sixth repetition.
“You say ‘I’ve got it’ often.”
“Usually because I’ve got it.”
“That is not always true.”
Daniel rolled a knotty section of maple onto the splitter. “Occupational habit.”
“You work alone even when assistance is available.”
“Also habit.”
Her ears angled toward him. “Habit is becoming an overused explanation.”
He remembered the same word beneath the cattle-shelter wall and the way she had waited instead of arguing with it.
“Probably,” he said.
The maple split unevenly. One half kicked sideways and landed in mud.
Neris reached it before Daniel did. They bent at the same time, shoulders colliding. Daniel steadied her by the upper arm. Her paw landed against his chest.
Both stopped.
The contact was not dramatic. It had become too familiar for that. What changed was that neither apologized.
Neris lifted the wood. “I have it.”
Daniel looked at her. “You say that often.”
Her eyes narrowed with amusement. “Occupational habit.”
When they finished the first stack, her tail drifted across the frosted grass and rested against the side of his boot.
“It believes you should not carry everything alone,” she said.
Daniel looked down at the striped fur, then at her. “Your tail has opinions now?”
“It has always had opinions. I have only recently begun translating them for you.”
He nudged the fur gently with the side of his boot. “Tell it I’ll take the advice under consideration.”
“It is not known for patience.”
By noon the fog had lifted. A pale sun showed above the spruce line without producing much warmth. Neris adjusted the end log by less than a finger’s width.
Daniel watched. “Close enough?”
She studied it. “Now it is.”
They moved into the tractor shed to escape the wind. The building held the dense smell of diesel, old hay, grease, cold steel, and mouse-chewed cardboard. A loader bucket waited near the doors. Behind it stood the baler, one wheel removed for winter bearing work. Shelves carried fencing staples, hydraulic fittings, mineral blocks, veterinary supplies, and enough miscellaneous hardware to support ER’s sedimentation theory.
An old workbench occupied the rear wall, half buried beneath boxes of baler parts and feed-system components. Daniel wanted the space cleared before the next round of machinery maintenance.
Without discussion, he took one end and Neris the other.
“Ready?”
She nodded.
They lifted together. Daniel stepped left as Neris stepped right, correcting at the same moment without speaking. They turned the bench between the baler tongue and a stack of calf panels, then set it square against the opposite wall.
Daniel rested his hands on the worn timber. “We’re getting good at this.”
“At moving furniture?”
“At knowing what the other person’s about to do.”
Neris looked at the bench, then at him.
Professional teams trained for months to develop that kind of coordination. Theirs had formed through gates, coolant lines, feed chores, mugs passed without asking, and tools already waiting in the right paw.
“I had not noticed,” she said.
“That’s probably why it works.”
Behind the bench sat an old cedar chest.
Daniel saw it and became still.
The chest was not hidden. It had remained exactly where he had put it years before, first because there was nowhere else to place it and later because moving it would have meant deciding what to do with the contents.
Neris brushed dust from the brass corner with one claw. “Does this belong here?”
“Not really.”
“Do you want me to move it?”
Daniel looked at the lid. “I don’t know.”
She waited.
The ability to wait had become one of the clearest differences between the Neris who had crashed and the one standing beside him now. Earlier, uncertainty had demanded action. Now she could leave room around it.
Daniel crouched and ran his hand along the cedar grain.
“I haven’t opened this in years.”
“You do not have to open it today.”
He almost agreed.
The practical part of him wanted the floor space cleared. The tired part wanted the chest returned behind the bench. Another part, quieter and more difficult, remembered the small curl of cedar produced by a carving knife and the evenings when work had ended before exhaustion did.
“Help me put it on the bench,” he said.
They lifted it together.
Daniel found the key inside an old coffee tin on the shelf. He had placed it there deliberately and then spent years pretending he did not know where it was.
The lock resisted. Neris steadied the lid while he worked a drop of oil into the mechanism. On the third attempt, the key turned.
The scent of cedar rose as he opened it.
Inside lay photographs, notebooks, bundled letters, an old pocket watch, a tin of small keepsakes, and carving tools wrapped in cloth. A wooden loon rested on top.
Neris did not reach for it immediately. She looked at Daniel first.
He nodded.
She lifted the carving with both paws. The grain followed the neck and wings so naturally that the bird seemed poised to move. One wing held a shallow tool mark Daniel had once meant to smooth and never had.
“You made this.”
Daniel nodded. “A long time ago.”
“It is beautiful.”
“It isn’t finished.”
Neris turned it beneath the shed light. “Those statements are not opposites.”
He looked away.
“I used to carve in the evenings,” he said.
“Why did you stop?”
The answer was obvious enough that she regretted asking as soon as the words left her.
Daniel did not punish her for it.
“Emily got sick. After that there was always something more important.”
“And later?”
“Later I was tired.”
Neris heard the kind of fatigue he meant. It was not measured by muscles or hours of sleep. It was the exhaustion of deciding that every unnecessary desire could wait until after the next obligation, then discovering there was always another obligation.
She returned the loon to the cloth.
“The tools remain,” she said.
“They do.”
“Then the possibility remains.”
Daniel gave her a small, uncertain smile. “You make it sound simple.”
“No. I make it sound possible.”
He unwrapped the tools one at a time. Knives, gouges, a small plane, a burnishing tool, and a set of stones. The steel had been oiled before storage. A faint haze marked two blades, but no serious corrosion had formed.
Beneath them lay a photograph of Daniel standing with his parents in front of the farmhouse. He was younger, broad-shouldered but not yet settled into the face he wore now. His father looked stern until the smile reached his eyes. His mother stood close enough that her shoulder pressed against Daniel’s.
“They look kind,” Neris said.
“They were. Dad could fix almost anything. Mum fed everyone who came through the door. Especially people who said they weren’t hungry.”
“I would have liked her.”
“She would’ve liked you.”
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