One Screw, Medium Length

The kitchen cabinet had been leaning slightly to the left since Sunday. On Wednesday evening I found out why. One screw from the top hinge was lying in the cutlery drawer, between two teaspoons, as if it had been hiding there.

I carried it to the hardware store on the corner in a sandwich bag.

“What are we looking at?” said the man behind the counter. He had one pair of reading glasses pushed up on his head and another around his neck.

“This came out of a cabinet hinge.”

He held it up to the light and turned it slowly, the way people look at a ring someone is trying to sell them.

“Wood screw. Countersunk. Number eight, maybe.” He moved the second pair of glasses to his face. “Maybe number six.”

“Is that a big difference?”

“To the hinge.”

He pulled a drawer of small cardboard boxes from under the counter. He tried the candidates against mine one by one, point to point, head to head, and rejected each with a short noise. A man behind me with a garden hose over his shoulder checked his watch, then the screws, then stepped closer to watch.

“Too long,” said the man with the hose.

“Too long,” the clerk agreed.

The fourth box was right: same head, same thread, same length. The clerk laid the two screws side by side on the counter like a pair of socks that had found each other.

“How much?”

“They come in a box of fifty.”

“I only need one.”

“Everybody only needs one.” He slid the box across. “Four ninety.”

I paid. On the walk home, the box rattled in my bag, forty-nine screws louder than I had planned.

The new screw went in in about twenty seconds, and the cabinet stood up straight. I put the box in the drawer under the sink. It went next to a box of picture hooks, an almost full box of wall plugs, and a box of washers I couldn’t remember buying.

Then I understood how that drawer had got started.

Cover photo: Unsplash.