The Assembler of Parts: A Novel by Raoul Wientzen

me back to Mother. “And she’ll never need an orthodontist, either,” she added confidently. We went downstairs to the living room where Mother fed me on the couch. Nana watched.
    My grandfather emerged from his rounds of the basement as my feeding ended.
    “Everything seems shipshape,” he allowed when he entered the living room. “Furnace is holding up. Hot water heater, too. No problems. No problems the rest of this winter. I might decalcify the humidifier pad. It’s gotten a mite crusty.” He sniffed the air to check the house’s humidity. “Not working bad, though. Probably like forty percent.”
    Mother had me in her lap for a burping. “Dad, this is Jessica Mary. Jessica, your granddad.”
    He came to his knees and studied my hands for a second. He took my right hand in his big, calloused paw and shook it till my head bobbed and he became a blur with a beard. “Call me Ned, young lady. Ned will do perfectly well.” He finally stopped his pumping and encased my hand between his two palms. He looked like a priest at prayer, with his hands held together and his red Irish face bowed and his copper hair slicked back and smelling of pomade. He was staring at my feet, which were covered by pink booties, gifts from Mother’s coworkers at the preschool she used to staff. He raised his head in a snapping motion. He asked excitedly, “Kate, she have big toes?”
    “I wouldn’t say big, Dad. Normal size toes. For a baby.”
    “I meant ‘big toes,’ you know, the two big ones.” He uncovered my hand and moved his thumb to the digit-denied side of my palm. He pressed in once, twice, a third time. I caught his thumb with my fingers before he could raise it again and held on tight. He looked surprised and said, “Well, now!”
    “Yeah, sure she does. And all the other toes, too,” Mother said with a hint of exasperation in her voice.
    “Maybe somebody could do a switch. Put her toes where the thumbs should be. Who needs all those toes down there anyway? Thumbs are what make us human.” He slipped his own human thumb from under my fingertips, and held it wide in the plane of his palm. “See, this is how she is without thumbs. Like a little critter or a bird. Her fingers are near useless. And this is what they could change her to.” His thumb moved out of the plane of the palm and did a little dance with his other digits. “See?”
    “I’ll mention your idea to the doctors, Dad. See what they think.”
    “Well, let’s all just call you Doctor Ned O’Brien from now on. You who spent forty years operating a bulldozer and a crane on the roads of Maryland. Girl’s got no thumbs, Ned. Never’ll have thumbs. Your tinkering around life is not going to change that.” Nana rose from the couch and stood over her kneeling husband. “I’ll go start the lunch. I could use a good hot cup of tea.”
    Ned sat next to Mother and watched Nana walk off. “Mom will be okay after a while,” he said. “You know how hard it is for her. Give her time, Kate, and she’ll come around.” They sat silently for a minute while Mother blotted an eye with her sleeve. “Can I hold her?” he asked. Mother nodded. “Well, Jessy, you sure seem to be taking all this in. Someday we’ll tell you all about your early months.” He settled me in his arm, just the way Cassidy had done. He felt the same, Ned did, like his arm was some solid shell around me, but he lacked the earthy odors that came away from Cassidy’s torso. Ned used deodorant and men’s cologne and smelled like a florist shop in the summer.
    “Dad, how old was he when he died? Billy? Do you even know much about him?”
    “She showed me pictures once just before we got married. I think she wanted me to know what I might be getting into. He was, I’d say, maybe three or four in the picture. Remember, now Kate, this was fifty, sixty years ago. There was nothing for children with birth defects back then, and he had this really bad heart condition as well as those