I sat down on the garage floor and put my face in my hands, because under that tarp was the little travel trailer we had talked about for twenty years and never once bought — and Dale had been building it for me by hand.
We had a plan, the way couples do. Someday, when the kids were grown and the mortgage was done, we were going to get a camper and drive the whole country — the coast road, the desert, the national parks, all of it, no schedule, just the two of us and the map. Someday. We said it so many times it had stopped meaning anything, the way somedays do.
Dale had not let it stop meaning something. In the back corner of the garage, on a trailer frame he must have hauled home when I was not paying attention, he had been building us that camper. The frame was done. The little walls were up, the cabinets he had clearly cut and sanded over a hundred evenings after work, a bed frame sized for the two of us. It was maybe three-quarters finished. He ran out of time in the middle of a cabinet door. There was a stroke at fifty-six, and forty-eight hours, and then the middle of that cabinet door was where he stopped forever.
Taped to the inside of one of the cabinets, where he knew I would eventually find it, was a folded piece of paper. It was a route. He had mapped the whole trip — the coast road, the desert, the parks — in his blocky, careful printing, with little notes beside some of the stops. At the top he had written: “For when we finally go. No more somedays. I’ll have her finished by spring. Start packing, sweetheart.”
He did not get her finished by spring. But I have.
It took me most of a year and the help of two of his friends from the shop, who showed up on Saturdays and would not take a dime, the way Dale never took a dime from anyone. We finished the cabinet door he had been working on. We built her out exactly to his plan.
And this spring I left. I took his route, laminated now so it will not wear out, taped back inside that same cabinet. I have driven the coast road. I have seen the desert he circled. At every stop he marked, I read his little note out loud, and I tell him what I am looking at, and I take the picture I know he would have taken.
Twenty-four years I thought I knew everything about my husband. I did not know he was building us our someday out in the garage, one cabinet at a time, refusing to let it stay a word we only said. No more somedays, he wrote. So I stopped waiting for one. We are finally going, Dale. I am packing light, and I am taking you with me.
