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- Story Listed as: Fiction For Adults
- Theme: Drama / Human Interest
- Subject: Character Based
- Published: 02/14/2026
The Purposeful Nebbish
Born 1945, M, from Boston/MA, United States.jpeg)
Having just finished breakfast, Sandra Crowell’s father was standing in the foyer with the car keys nestled in his hand. “Where’re you going?” she asked.
“To get a special table saw blade for cutting furniture joints. The Robinson boy, who works at the hardware store downtown, is going to help me select the right one.”
“Which Robinson?” “As I remember there were a half-dozen siblings… all males.”
“The one you attended high school with… Trevor.”
Sandra cringed inwardly. Of all the Robinsons, he could have been voted least likely to succeed. Trevor Robinson with his dirty brown hair, watery hazel eyes that never quite looked you full in the face and goofy smile - he was a habitually timid, luckless sort, a person of no significance and irredeemable ne’er-do-well. Sandra glanced out the window at a clump of purple crocuses bursting through the brittle earth. Spring was edging out the winter’s bitter chills. “Trevor asked me to the senior prom.”
“But, as I remember, you went with Buddy Collette.” Sandra nodded and her lips melted in a wistful smile. Wide receiver on the varsity football team - Brandenburg would never have made it to the regional semi-finals without Buddy’s speed, crafty moves and sure hands. “Whatever happened to Buddy?”
Sandra’s pleasant glow faded. “ “He took to drink among a myriad of other bad habits.” Reaching for a coat hanging in the entryway, she murmured, “I’ll join you for the ride.”
* * * * *
When they arrived at the hardware store, Trevor Robinson was just finishing a sale with another customer. “About that tool for cutting woodworking joints,” Mr. Crowell said, stepping closer to the counter.
“Oh, yes.” If he recognised Sandra, he made no mention of it. Rather, Trevor headed off in the direction of the POwer tool aisle, pulling up in front of an assortment of routers, chisels and brad point drill bits. “The other day you mentioned something about a bookcase. This Freud, six-inch stacked dado set is perfect for cutting mortise and tenon joints.”
“What’s that?” Sandra asked.
“Mortise and tenon,” Trevor repeated. “It’s a fancy term for tongue and groove. You cut a shallow notch in the edge of one board and a narrow wedge in the adjacent wood. Slide the two pieces together with a bit of glue and you’ve got a sturdy, decorative joint.”
Mr. Crowell held the cutter up to the light. “Blades sure are thick.”
“That’s so you clear waste quickly. For your purposes two blades would give you a quarter inch groove, which is all that’s really needed for small furniture projects.”
“I see.” By his muddled expression and furrowed brow it was clear that Mr. Crowell was becoming increasingly confused.
“Here, let me show you.” Near the back of the store Trevor grabbed a narrow pine board which he wedged up against the fence on a 10-inch, Ryobi table saw. “Metal blades should never sit too close to the fence when you're positioning the wood, so you always clamp a board in front of the workpiece.”
Five minutes passed. Trevor had explained how to remove the metal spacer and install the blades when the door at the opposite end of the store opened and several new customers entered and began milling about the hand tools display. Trevor straightened up. “I’m not working this weekend. If you like I could stop by Saturday morning and get you properly situated with the new tool.”
Mr. Crowell breathed a huge sigh of relief. “That would be great!”
“How’s ten o’clock?”
The older man grinned and shook his head in the affirmative. “I’ll be waiting with a pot of fresh-perked coffee, pile of dark walnut boards and a bottle of yellow carpenter’s glue.”
* * * * *
When they had travelled several miles down the road after leaving the hardware store, Sandra muttered, "About the high school prom… I was less than honest.”
Mr. Crowell had been admiring the new foliage where several varieties of deciduous trees were just beginning to bud but none were yet in bloom. “What’s that?”
“When Trevor Robinson asked me to the senior prom, I still hadn’t any date. Buddy popped the question a month later.”
Mr. Crowley pulled up at a red traffic light. “So you lied to Trevor rather than tell him you were hedging your bets, holding out for a better offer?”
His daughter left the straightforward question unanswered, and there was no more small talk on the remainder of the trip home.
* * * * *
Later that night Sandra recalled how patient Trevor had been showing her father how to negotiate the complicated cuts. He walked the older man through each step, measuring and marking the boards with infinite care. Too bad her former classmate was still moldering away in a dumpy hardware store, hawking lawnmowers and garden tools through the hazy summer months, snowblowers, rock salt and plastic shovels during the frigid winters.
But what difference did it make? The once photogenically handsome and dynamic Buddy Collette was going bald and had never bothered to replace a chipped tooth in the front of his mouth. Many of her high school chums had married, started families of their own and drifted away. They lived in an idyllic parallel universe; Sandra Crowley remained hopelessly lost in a cul de sac of aimless reverie. But what to do? At twenty-six she needed a guide to help navigate the troublesome terrain of young adulthood. A modern-day Sacagawea, the Shoshone woman who in her teens led Louis and Clark thousands of miles from North Dakota to the Pacific Ocean - was that too much to ask? The living room clock chimed midnight. Sandra fluffed her pillow, rolled over on her side and drifted off to sleep.
* * * * *
When Trevor Robinson showed up promptly at ten o’clock Saturday morning, Sandra accompanied the twosome downstairs into the basement. Trevor promptly clamped a piece of scrap wood to the metal fence on the table saw just as he had done at the hardware store then removed a small metal spacer from the hub of the bulky machine. “As I mentioned at the store, you always need to make additional space to accommodate the width of the dado blades.”
Sandra stood off to one side in the shadows near the furnace as Trevor installed the two main cutters and tightened the nut. Lowering the blades just below the surface of the tool, he flipped the switch setting the blades in motion. Next he raised the cutters in tiny increments until the dado blade extended a half inch above the surface of the table. Only a portion of the blade extended beyond the protective fence. “Ready to cut your first tenon?"
Sandra’s father stepped closer to the tool. “You’ll want the tenon about a quarter inch thick.” With a piece of scrap plywood that he fished out of a small toolbag Trevor scribed a pencil mark across the edge of a walnut board, then placed the wood on the flat surface firmly wedged up against the miter gauge, which was resting in its vertical slot.
“You push the stock through the blade,” Mr. Crowley spoke, anticipating what the young man was going to say, “then keep raising the cutter until the blade kisses the underpart of the pencil mark and you’ve got your perfect tenon.”
Trevor nodded in agreement.
“Then mark the surface of the mating edge,” Sandra, who had been listening attentively, added “to figure out where to cut the groove.”
Trevor grinned and softly clapped his hands in silent tribute. “Spoken like a true woodworker!” All the boards are three-quarters inch thick so if you set the fence in place and cut all joints at the same time, it’s foolproof.”
* * * * *
Later that morning while Mr. Crowell was cleaning up and putting the tools away, Sandra walked Trevor out to his car. “I can’t thank you enough for helping my father,” she said in a low-keyed, appreciative tone. “ He hadn’t a clue how to use the tool until you showed him.”
Trevor stowed a bag of tools he had brought with him in the rear of the car and slammed the trunk. A troubled expression flitted across his face momentarily. “I know that throughout high school most of the kids thought of me as a bit of a loser. If nothing else, I understand joinery, how to firmly bind wood together. It might not seem like much but there’s a lot of attention to detail involved. I can’t even begin to tell you how many mistakes I made when I was learning to cut a proper mortise and tenon joint." His words fell away but there was no regret, no sense of bitterness; Trevor Robinson had made peace with his lot in life and was perfectly comfortable in his own skin.
As he reached for the handle on the driver’s side of the car, Sandra blurted, “What other joints can you make?”
The man stared at her confusedly trying to decipher her intent. “You’ve developed a newfound interest in woodworking?”
“No, I’ve an ulterior motive,” she replied opaquely.
Trevor waited a discreet interval, but when it was clear that the girl was unwilling to elaborate he said, “Joints… there is an endless array.” “Miter joints cut at a forty-five degree angle are most common, but they’re also the weakest so you have to reinforce them with splines, which are thin scraps of decorative wood glued into all four corners.”
“Sounds rather complicated.”
Trevor shrugged off the remark. “You need to make a v-shaped jig that perches on the table saw fence, stand the unfinished box on end and cut a thin groove in all four corners. Then you insert the splines with a drop of glue. That’s all."
“You make it sound so simple.”
Trevor crooked his head and mop of curly brown hair to one side, a dismissive gesture making light of his commentary. “It’s what I do for a living.” He eyed the enigmatic woman uncertainly. “Joints,” he repeated a second time. “There’s the lap and finger joint - also known as the box joint - and the wickedly intricate dovetail.”
“Dovetail?”
“The dovetail joint probably pre-dates written history. Some of the earliest known examples of the dovetail joint are in ancient Egyptian furniture entombed with mummies dating from the First Dynasty; they have also been found in the tombs of Chinese emperors, and a stone pillar at an ancient temple in India.” “They call it ‘dovetail’ because the trapezoidal shape resembles a dove’s tail.”
“You called it wickedly intricate,” Sandra said. “Is it really that hard to make?”
“Impossible,” he clarified, “for a novice like me.” Reaching into his shirt pocket, he pulled out a cell phone and thumbed through a series of photographs. “Here, see for yourself.”
Sandra gawked at a photo of a small box in red oak. The joints were so awkward and clumsily made that they resembled a cartoonish caricature of what the box was meant to look like. “I keep that picture,” Trevor explained, “as a reminder of how terribly difficult the dovetail joint is when you’re working with a chisel and razor-thin backsaw.”
“Looks,” Sandra agreed, “like something out of the stone age.”
“That’s for sure!” Trevor added then stared at her pointedly. “You mentioned an ulterior motive?”
Sandra stepped closer and looked him directly in the eyes. “When I was younger I had life figured out or at least I thought I did, but in recent years everything turned to shit."
Without warning the pleasant banter had slipped away, crawled under a rock. Something had gone utterly haywire, and Trevor felt the congenial mood slipping away in a bedlam of misplaced emotions. “I figured that out early on,” he muttered.
Suddenly and without warning, Sandra Crowley began to cry. She wept soundlessly and with neither shame nor embarrassment; her slender hands cupped at her waist, the tears dribbled down the cheeks in salty rivulets. She wiped the wetness away with the back of a hand and lurched still closer. “So how does one make a reasonable life going forward?”
After a tense silence, Trevor noted, “At the hardware store every tool solves a problem. “When a carpenter needs to build a split-level house, we don’t send him away with a flimsy tap hammer. We suggest an Estwing, metal-shank, twenty-eight-ounce framing hammer that can bury a 16-penny, three-and-a-half-inch nail in two quick blows.”
Sandra scowled and blew out her cheeks in exasperation. “I’m having a mental meltdown, and you're talking home construction?”
“We live in a user-unfriendly universe, " Trevor clarified, “a minotaur’s maze of absurdities and nonsense, but that doesn’t mean people can’t find solutions.”
* * * * *
After Trevor Robinson drove away, the young woman finally returned to the house, where her father was sitting at the kitchen table sipping a cup of coffee. “You sure were out there quite a long time with Trevor.”
“Had some unfinished business to discuss.”
“You tied up the loose ends?”
“No, not really,” Sandra replied in an offhand manner. “But it doesn't really matter, because Friday evening we’re going to a pleasant restaurant on Federal Hill to pick up where things left off.”
“To get a special table saw blade for cutting furniture joints. The Robinson boy, who works at the hardware store downtown, is going to help me select the right one.”
“Which Robinson?” “As I remember there were a half-dozen siblings… all males.”
“The one you attended high school with… Trevor.”
Sandra cringed inwardly. Of all the Robinsons, he could have been voted least likely to succeed. Trevor Robinson with his dirty brown hair, watery hazel eyes that never quite looked you full in the face and goofy smile - he was a habitually timid, luckless sort, a person of no significance and irredeemable ne’er-do-well. Sandra glanced out the window at a clump of purple crocuses bursting through the brittle earth. Spring was edging out the winter’s bitter chills. “Trevor asked me to the senior prom.”
“But, as I remember, you went with Buddy Collette.” Sandra nodded and her lips melted in a wistful smile. Wide receiver on the varsity football team - Brandenburg would never have made it to the regional semi-finals without Buddy’s speed, crafty moves and sure hands. “Whatever happened to Buddy?”
Sandra’s pleasant glow faded. “ “He took to drink among a myriad of other bad habits.” Reaching for a coat hanging in the entryway, she murmured, “I’ll join you for the ride.”
* * * * *
When they arrived at the hardware store, Trevor Robinson was just finishing a sale with another customer. “About that tool for cutting woodworking joints,” Mr. Crowell said, stepping closer to the counter.
“Oh, yes.” If he recognised Sandra, he made no mention of it. Rather, Trevor headed off in the direction of the POwer tool aisle, pulling up in front of an assortment of routers, chisels and brad point drill bits. “The other day you mentioned something about a bookcase. This Freud, six-inch stacked dado set is perfect for cutting mortise and tenon joints.”
“What’s that?” Sandra asked.
“Mortise and tenon,” Trevor repeated. “It’s a fancy term for tongue and groove. You cut a shallow notch in the edge of one board and a narrow wedge in the adjacent wood. Slide the two pieces together with a bit of glue and you’ve got a sturdy, decorative joint.”
Mr. Crowell held the cutter up to the light. “Blades sure are thick.”
“That’s so you clear waste quickly. For your purposes two blades would give you a quarter inch groove, which is all that’s really needed for small furniture projects.”
“I see.” By his muddled expression and furrowed brow it was clear that Mr. Crowell was becoming increasingly confused.
“Here, let me show you.” Near the back of the store Trevor grabbed a narrow pine board which he wedged up against the fence on a 10-inch, Ryobi table saw. “Metal blades should never sit too close to the fence when you're positioning the wood, so you always clamp a board in front of the workpiece.”
Five minutes passed. Trevor had explained how to remove the metal spacer and install the blades when the door at the opposite end of the store opened and several new customers entered and began milling about the hand tools display. Trevor straightened up. “I’m not working this weekend. If you like I could stop by Saturday morning and get you properly situated with the new tool.”
Mr. Crowell breathed a huge sigh of relief. “That would be great!”
“How’s ten o’clock?”
The older man grinned and shook his head in the affirmative. “I’ll be waiting with a pot of fresh-perked coffee, pile of dark walnut boards and a bottle of yellow carpenter’s glue.”
* * * * *
When they had travelled several miles down the road after leaving the hardware store, Sandra muttered, "About the high school prom… I was less than honest.”
Mr. Crowell had been admiring the new foliage where several varieties of deciduous trees were just beginning to bud but none were yet in bloom. “What’s that?”
“When Trevor Robinson asked me to the senior prom, I still hadn’t any date. Buddy popped the question a month later.”
Mr. Crowley pulled up at a red traffic light. “So you lied to Trevor rather than tell him you were hedging your bets, holding out for a better offer?”
His daughter left the straightforward question unanswered, and there was no more small talk on the remainder of the trip home.
* * * * *
Later that night Sandra recalled how patient Trevor had been showing her father how to negotiate the complicated cuts. He walked the older man through each step, measuring and marking the boards with infinite care. Too bad her former classmate was still moldering away in a dumpy hardware store, hawking lawnmowers and garden tools through the hazy summer months, snowblowers, rock salt and plastic shovels during the frigid winters.
But what difference did it make? The once photogenically handsome and dynamic Buddy Collette was going bald and had never bothered to replace a chipped tooth in the front of his mouth. Many of her high school chums had married, started families of their own and drifted away. They lived in an idyllic parallel universe; Sandra Crowley remained hopelessly lost in a cul de sac of aimless reverie. But what to do? At twenty-six she needed a guide to help navigate the troublesome terrain of young adulthood. A modern-day Sacagawea, the Shoshone woman who in her teens led Louis and Clark thousands of miles from North Dakota to the Pacific Ocean - was that too much to ask? The living room clock chimed midnight. Sandra fluffed her pillow, rolled over on her side and drifted off to sleep.
* * * * *
When Trevor Robinson showed up promptly at ten o’clock Saturday morning, Sandra accompanied the twosome downstairs into the basement. Trevor promptly clamped a piece of scrap wood to the metal fence on the table saw just as he had done at the hardware store then removed a small metal spacer from the hub of the bulky machine. “As I mentioned at the store, you always need to make additional space to accommodate the width of the dado blades.”
Sandra stood off to one side in the shadows near the furnace as Trevor installed the two main cutters and tightened the nut. Lowering the blades just below the surface of the tool, he flipped the switch setting the blades in motion. Next he raised the cutters in tiny increments until the dado blade extended a half inch above the surface of the table. Only a portion of the blade extended beyond the protective fence. “Ready to cut your first tenon?"
Sandra’s father stepped closer to the tool. “You’ll want the tenon about a quarter inch thick.” With a piece of scrap plywood that he fished out of a small toolbag Trevor scribed a pencil mark across the edge of a walnut board, then placed the wood on the flat surface firmly wedged up against the miter gauge, which was resting in its vertical slot.
“You push the stock through the blade,” Mr. Crowley spoke, anticipating what the young man was going to say, “then keep raising the cutter until the blade kisses the underpart of the pencil mark and you’ve got your perfect tenon.”
Trevor nodded in agreement.
“Then mark the surface of the mating edge,” Sandra, who had been listening attentively, added “to figure out where to cut the groove.”
Trevor grinned and softly clapped his hands in silent tribute. “Spoken like a true woodworker!” All the boards are three-quarters inch thick so if you set the fence in place and cut all joints at the same time, it’s foolproof.”
* * * * *
Later that morning while Mr. Crowell was cleaning up and putting the tools away, Sandra walked Trevor out to his car. “I can’t thank you enough for helping my father,” she said in a low-keyed, appreciative tone. “ He hadn’t a clue how to use the tool until you showed him.”
Trevor stowed a bag of tools he had brought with him in the rear of the car and slammed the trunk. A troubled expression flitted across his face momentarily. “I know that throughout high school most of the kids thought of me as a bit of a loser. If nothing else, I understand joinery, how to firmly bind wood together. It might not seem like much but there’s a lot of attention to detail involved. I can’t even begin to tell you how many mistakes I made when I was learning to cut a proper mortise and tenon joint." His words fell away but there was no regret, no sense of bitterness; Trevor Robinson had made peace with his lot in life and was perfectly comfortable in his own skin.
As he reached for the handle on the driver’s side of the car, Sandra blurted, “What other joints can you make?”
The man stared at her confusedly trying to decipher her intent. “You’ve developed a newfound interest in woodworking?”
“No, I’ve an ulterior motive,” she replied opaquely.
Trevor waited a discreet interval, but when it was clear that the girl was unwilling to elaborate he said, “Joints… there is an endless array.” “Miter joints cut at a forty-five degree angle are most common, but they’re also the weakest so you have to reinforce them with splines, which are thin scraps of decorative wood glued into all four corners.”
“Sounds rather complicated.”
Trevor shrugged off the remark. “You need to make a v-shaped jig that perches on the table saw fence, stand the unfinished box on end and cut a thin groove in all four corners. Then you insert the splines with a drop of glue. That’s all."
“You make it sound so simple.”
Trevor crooked his head and mop of curly brown hair to one side, a dismissive gesture making light of his commentary. “It’s what I do for a living.” He eyed the enigmatic woman uncertainly. “Joints,” he repeated a second time. “There’s the lap and finger joint - also known as the box joint - and the wickedly intricate dovetail.”
“Dovetail?”
“The dovetail joint probably pre-dates written history. Some of the earliest known examples of the dovetail joint are in ancient Egyptian furniture entombed with mummies dating from the First Dynasty; they have also been found in the tombs of Chinese emperors, and a stone pillar at an ancient temple in India.” “They call it ‘dovetail’ because the trapezoidal shape resembles a dove’s tail.”
“You called it wickedly intricate,” Sandra said. “Is it really that hard to make?”
“Impossible,” he clarified, “for a novice like me.” Reaching into his shirt pocket, he pulled out a cell phone and thumbed through a series of photographs. “Here, see for yourself.”
Sandra gawked at a photo of a small box in red oak. The joints were so awkward and clumsily made that they resembled a cartoonish caricature of what the box was meant to look like. “I keep that picture,” Trevor explained, “as a reminder of how terribly difficult the dovetail joint is when you’re working with a chisel and razor-thin backsaw.”
“Looks,” Sandra agreed, “like something out of the stone age.”
“That’s for sure!” Trevor added then stared at her pointedly. “You mentioned an ulterior motive?”
Sandra stepped closer and looked him directly in the eyes. “When I was younger I had life figured out or at least I thought I did, but in recent years everything turned to shit."
Without warning the pleasant banter had slipped away, crawled under a rock. Something had gone utterly haywire, and Trevor felt the congenial mood slipping away in a bedlam of misplaced emotions. “I figured that out early on,” he muttered.
Suddenly and without warning, Sandra Crowley began to cry. She wept soundlessly and with neither shame nor embarrassment; her slender hands cupped at her waist, the tears dribbled down the cheeks in salty rivulets. She wiped the wetness away with the back of a hand and lurched still closer. “So how does one make a reasonable life going forward?”
After a tense silence, Trevor noted, “At the hardware store every tool solves a problem. “When a carpenter needs to build a split-level house, we don’t send him away with a flimsy tap hammer. We suggest an Estwing, metal-shank, twenty-eight-ounce framing hammer that can bury a 16-penny, three-and-a-half-inch nail in two quick blows.”
Sandra scowled and blew out her cheeks in exasperation. “I’m having a mental meltdown, and you're talking home construction?”
“We live in a user-unfriendly universe, " Trevor clarified, “a minotaur’s maze of absurdities and nonsense, but that doesn’t mean people can’t find solutions.”
* * * * *
After Trevor Robinson drove away, the young woman finally returned to the house, where her father was sitting at the kitchen table sipping a cup of coffee. “You sure were out there quite a long time with Trevor.”
“Had some unfinished business to discuss.”
“You tied up the loose ends?”
“No, not really,” Sandra replied in an offhand manner. “But it doesn't really matter, because Friday evening we’re going to a pleasant restaurant on Federal Hill to pick up where things left off.”
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