I showed him how to begin again.
“Slow down,” I told him. “The wood isn’t going anywhere.”
Diane heard me and smiled.
After the students left, she walked over to the first workbench.
“This is what Mark wanted,” she said.
I looked around the room.
“No. This is what he and my father wanted. We’re just the people who finally got it done.”
She slipped her hand into mine.
For a moment, I imagined my father standing beside the workbench, examining the joinery, finding something to criticize, and then pretending he hadn’t been impressed.
I wished he could have seen it.
I wished Mark could have seen it, too.
But grief no longer felt like a locked room.
It felt like a door I could open without being afraid of what waited on the other side.
A week after the opening, Richard Bell called again.
He had one final document he wanted us to see.
