I turned the key in unit 118 and rolled up the door, my heart in my throat, and the light fell on a writing desk, stacks of paper, jars of colored pencils, and pinned across every wall, the hand-drawn, hand-lettered pages of a childrens book, and on the cover, in a childs help: The Adventures of Grandpa and Little Bee.
I sat down at that desk and began to turn the pages.
The little one the desk girl mentioned was our granddaughter Beatrice, whom Harold called Little Bee, and the two of them had been secretly writing and illustrating a whole book together, a storybook of their imagined adventures, over years of Saturdays.
It was the most wonderful thing. Page after page, Harolds gentle drawings and Beatrices wobbly ones side by side, telling the story of a grandfather and a little girl who sailed on cloud-ships and befriended dragons and had grand adventures, all invented on Saturday afternoons.
Harolds letter was tucked in the finished pages. He wrote: Old girl, Little Bee has more imagination than any child alive, and nobody had the time to feed it. So her and I, we made a book. Every Saturday we wrote another adventure. She tells them, I draw them, she colors them in. It is nearly done. If I did not get to finish it, please, help her complete the last few pages, and then get it made into a real book she can hold, so she knows her stories, and her Grandpa, were real. Every child should see their imagination become a real book once in their life.
I wept over that beautiful book my husband and my granddaughter had dreamed up together.
Him and the little one. My Harold had spent his Saturdays nurturing a childs imagination into something she could hold in her hands forever.
Beatrice, when I saw her, told me all about their book, their secret adventures, the worlds they built together. She was heartbroken it was unfinished, that Grandpa was gone.
So she and I finished it. She told me the last adventures, and we found an artist to complete Harolds drawings in his style, and I had the whole thing printed into a real, hardcover book.
The Adventures of Grandpa and Little Bee sits on Beatrices shelf now, a real book, with her name and Harolds on the cover. She reads it to her friends. She reads it to herself at night. Her Grandpa is on every page, adventuring with her still.
We even printed extra copies, and the little library downtown keeps one, so other children can read the adventures of a grandfather and his Little Bee.
My daughter still did not know why her father spent Saturdays away. Now she knows he was making a childs imagination immortal. Him and the little one wrote a book together. I helped them finish it. And Beatrice will have her Grandpas love, in her hands, in a real book, for the rest of her life.