I crossed to it and pulled the tarp off, and I had to sit right down on the cold concrete, because it was a house. Our house. A little one, built to about knee height on a big plywood table, but it was our house, down to the last detail, and my husband had made it with his own two hands.
Every board of it. The green shutters he painted green the summer of eighty-nine. The porch with the crooked third step he never did get around to fixing. The maple out front, made of twisted wire and paper, the very tree our girls used to climb. He had built our whole home in miniature, and when I lifted the little roof off, my legs about gave out under me, because inside it was furnished. All of it. Our kitchen table with its four little chairs, and then two more chairs added on for when the grandbabies came, exactly the way we really did add them.
And the walls. On the tiny walls he had hung tiny photographs, printed out small as postage stamps. Our wedding. The girls as babies. The whole crowd of us down at the lake. Every room of that little house was a room of our actual life, and every wall was hung with the moments that had happened in it. Thirty-eight years of marriage, built board by board and hung picture by picture, in secret, in a rented garage at the end of a gravel lane, by a foreman from the box plant who told me he loved me every day but could not, I guess, find a way to say the whole size of it out loud, so he built it instead.
There was a card standing on the little kitchen table inside, sized for a giant. For our 40th, since I am no good with speeches. This right here is the best thing I ever did with my life, this house and every soul in it. Thank you for all of it. Gene.
Our fortieth anniversary would have been this coming fall. He did not make it to it. And I spent the better part of two weeks after that garage note eating myself alive at the kitchen table, thinking the worst, thinking secrets and shadows and another woman, all the ugly places a frightened widow lets her mind run. And the secret was this. The secret was a steady quiet man who loved our plain ordinary life so much that he spent years rebuilding it in miniature, so that he could hand me our whole world in a box and say thank you.
The little house sits in our front room now, just through the doorway from the real front room it copies. My girls came over and we all sat down on the floor around it and found ourselves in it, room by room, year by year, bawling and laughing at the same time. The grandbabies love it best of anybody. They lie on the rug and look in through the little windows at the tiny photographs of their own mamas as babies, in the tiny rooms of the real house they are lying inside of.
Not a sneaking man, my Gene. Not a shadow or a secret in him, not really. Just a man who took the whole happy life the two of us built and built it all over again, small enough to hold, so that I would have it in my hands after he was gone. I have it in my hands. I will have it there the rest of my days.