As I twirled my pink-dressed partner in the Boston Dance Club ballroom finals, every man in the audience resembled my father. I tried to imagine him in the empty chair in the front row next to my husband Eric. He would study my footwork with meticulous attention—the same way he studied his coins in the basement through a loupe under the light from a single lamp. He’d will my feet into perfect placement on the waxed floor with soft murmurs.

My father never cared for dancing. But he showed me how to sharpen a chisel on a wet stone when I was eight. He adjusted the angle of the blade, and explained how the micro-bevel was only visible when kissed by light. I gasped, as he dragged the blade across my arm and the peach fuzz disappeared like a scythe over grass. He winked and pointed towards his wood chest teeming with chisels and hand planes.

“After you learn how to sharpen tools, you and I are going to build a woodshed out back.” His inspecting eyes flashed and he threw me a wink.

The first day we started digging, we hit bedrock and my dad wobbled towards a tree and collapsed against the trunk. His shirt was dark with sweat and his precise eyes were vague as he stared up at the leaves. The next week, after his first round of chemo, my father sat in the living room and blankly stared at the television from his leather armchair. He handed me graph paper and I studied the woodshed blueprint perfectly laid out with a scaled ruler. He left the digging bar and shovel out back and gestured towards the yard with his hand. His gray eyes glazed into the screen while a marine carpenter explained how to bend wood to build a boat. 

I went out to the yard, and I drove the digging bar into the bedrock and felt the force in my teeth. Through the living room window, I could see the silhouette of my father sleeping on his armchair while the light from the TV danced across his face. I felt the stubble on my arm, where he shaved it with a chisel weeks before. A muggy breeze blew tumbleweed across the yard, and it looked like clumps of hair. Teary-eyed, I raised the bar into the air, gritted my teeth, and slammed it down with all my strength. 

Either the dirt on the rock danced or the bedrock moved. I dropped to my knees and swept off some soil and tapped the hard edge for aim. Then, from my knees, I lifted the bar and thrust it down. A spark flew as the corner chipped and ricocheted off my face and the bar broke through the rock into the soft cake-batter earth below. The momentum carried me down into the hole. It was cool and quiet, and I dug my hands under either side of the rock like a hungry badger and wedged my arms beneath it. I felt my biceps strain, as I curled the rock free with both hands. 

It wasn’t bedrock, and the rock was only the size of a football with a flattened face. I stepped out of the hole and held it up and careened the stone across the blue sky and pretended it was the moon eclipsing the sun. I hurried in the house to tell my father.

When I shook him in his armchair his shoulder was stiff and the air smelled like sour milk. The carpenter on the show warned that if the wood is too dry when you frame the hull it will bend and break. I lifted my father’s cold hand and let the heavy weight fall, and it hung by his side. I ripped the plug out of the wall and the picture on the screen vanished into itself.

After we returned from the funeral home that night, I waited for my mom’s gentle snores before I trudged outside into the backyard. There was no moon in the dark sky, and I cried and swore as I rolled the rock back into the hole and filled it in with earth, wishing it had been bedrock after all.

From the first-place podium I looked at the empty seat next to Eric and saw my father’s sly grin. As I raised the trophy, I imagined the jagged corners of the woodshed stone careening across the sky. After the competition, Eric and I drove to my father’s old cape house with my gold trophy resting in the backseat like a sleeping child. It was late, and we were the only car that crossed the bridge over the Cape Cod Canal. I looked down as the moonlit water lapped onto the rocky shore. When we arrived at the house, I searched the back corner of the garage, sifting through rakes and rusted beached chairs. Encased in cobwebs, I grabbed the digging bar and shovel and headed towards the backyard.