Claire brought up rebuilding on a Saturday morning, standing in the doorway with coffee, looking at the empty rectangle of sky where the arbor's top used to be.
"We should rebuild it," she said.
I had my answer ready. I had been keeping it ready for weeks, oiled and loaded.
"It wouldn't be the same."
"No," she said. "It wouldn't."
That was not how the argument was supposed to go. She was supposed to argue that it could be the same, and I was supposed to win by pointing at the split crosspieces in the garage. Instead she agreed with me in the first ten seconds and left me holding a speech with nowhere to deliver it.
"Then why pretend?" I said, recovering badly.
"We're not pretending." She came out onto the patio and nodded at the vine, which had climbed its twine and was now reaching, optimistically, for nothing at all. "Look at it. It's still alive, Nathan. The trunk survived. The roots survived. Half the canopy is sitting there growing toward a frame that doesn't exist."
"Vines do that."
"So do families," she said, which was unfair, and she knew it was unfair, and she drank her coffee while it landed.
I tried a different approach. Practical objections. I am good at practical objections; they have kept me safe from many feelings.
"The cedar aloneโ"
"Restitution covered materials. You have the estimate in the folder you keep closing."
"Owen will complain the entire time."
"Owen complains the entire time when he eats," she said. "That is not data."
"It will take weekends."
"We have weekends. That is famously what they are for."
I looked at the stacked boards in the open garage, numbered in chalk, waiting. I had told myself I was keeping them for the claim. The claim was settled. They were still there, and so was the post with the height marks, which I had propped carefully against the garage wall like a person sleeping.
"Claire."
"I know," she said, and her voice changed, got quieter and less interested in winning. "I know it was his. I know every time you stand under it you are forty pounds lighter and he is alive and telling you to hold the board level. I am not asking you to replace that. Nothing replaces that, and anything that claimed to would be lying."
She set her cup down on the patio table.
"Grandpa built the first one," she said. "You build the next. That is not pretending it is the same. That is how the thing was always supposed to work. He did not build it to be a museum. He built it so people would eat grapes under it. Grapes are currently growing toward empty air because the eating-under-it part got knocked down by a woman with a fake form."
Lily, who had appeared in the doorway in her socks at some point during this, said, "The grapes need somewhere to be."
"The grapes need somewhere to be," Claire repeated, with the solemnity of a lawyer entering testimony. "The witness has spoken."
"It is not a weekend job," I said. "If we do it, we do it properly. New footings. The old post stays if it is sound, marks and all. We reuse every board that can carry weight and we do not fake the rest to look old. New wood looks new. I am not distressing anything with a chain like a television show."
Claire smiled for the first time that morning.
"Was that a yes buried inside a building code?"
"It was a conditional approval."
"Good enough. I will tell the children their father has conditionally approved joy."
I stood there a while after she went in, looking at the gap in the garden, and I tried to be honest about what I had actually been protecting by refusing.
Not the arbor. The arbor was boards, and boards were already broken.
I had been protecting the last version of it โ the final summer it was entirely his work, untouched โ because once I rebuilt it, his hands would no longer be the last ones on it. Mine would. And after that, someday, Owen's. That was the grief, standing there in work boots: the thing would go on without Walter being its most recent author, and going on is just loss, spread out so thin you can live inside it.
Claire, as usual, had understood this before I did, and had simply decided that going on was also the point.
"All right," I said to the empty garden, and to the vine, and to the post asleep against the garage wall.
"All right. We build the next one."