"It's better because it's 40 minutes from my dad and it's 20 minutes from you, and there's a good elementary school district, which is a weird thing to notice about a job except I noticed it, and I don't think I need to explain why I noticed it." Marcus's throat tightened. "No," he said. "You don't." "So I'm taking it," Emily said.
"I already told them yes. I just—I wanted you to be the first to know after Dad." She paused. "Is that okay? That I wanted you to be the first to know?" Marcus looked out over the job site at the frame of a building going up against the sky.
And he thought about how strange it was that a man could spend 5 years absolutely certain his life had already been written, only to find out the pen was still in his hand the whole time. "Yeah," he said. "That's okay. That's more than okay." When he told Harold that evening, the old man cried.
He tried to hide it, pretended he had something in his eye, blamed the medication, but he cried. And then he grabbed Marcus's hand across the kitchen table and held it hard. "She's staying," Harold said. "My girl's staying, and not because anybody made her. Because she wants to."
He shook his head, wiping his face with his free hand. "You have any idea what that means to me, son? To know she's 40 minutes away, building the life she actually wants instead of a thousand m away proving she doesn't need anybody?" His voice cracked. "That's all I wanted since the day her mother—"
"That's the only thing I've wanted for 3 years. And now I get to see it. I get to be here for it." "You do," Marcus said quietly. "You get to be here for all of it." By the time Harold was cleared to do light work again, real light, Emily-supervised, no-lifting-anything-heavier-than-a-paintbrush light, it was the beginning of spring.
And the garden house was ready for its final push. They finished it together, the four of them, over a series of Saturdays that Marcus would remember for the rest of his life. Harold sat in a chair and directed like a general, pointing out exactly where his wife had wanted each shelf, each window box, the exact spot where she'd said she wanted to put her rocking chair so she could watch the morning birds. Emily did the fine work, the trim and the detail, her mother's dream taking shape under her careful hands. Marcus handled anything that required a strong back.
And Ava. Ava did the hard parts, which mostly meant she painted a small crooked sunflower on the inside of the door that everyone agreed was the best part of the whole structure and would absolutely not be painted over. "That stays forever," Harold decreed, looking at the crooked sunflower. "That's the most important part of the whole house now." "Anybody paints over that, they answer to me."
On the last Saturday, when the final piece of trim was nailed into place and the last coat of paint had dried, the four of them stood back and looked at what they'd built. It was finished. After all those years of Harold putting it off, after all those years of a dream deferred, after a collapse and a hospital and a heart that had almost given out, it was finished. A little garden house, white and clean and perfect, sitting in the backyard exactly where a woman named Ruth Bennett had always wanted it. Harold was quiet for a long time.
"She'd have loved it," he finally said. His voice was rough. "Ruth, she'd have—she'd have cried probably. She was a crier. Happy things, sad things, commercials, didn't matter."