He rewired the back rooms.

He’d stand in the half-finished kitchen with sawdust in his hair and tell me where the crib would go, which room got the morning light, how he wanted a garden out back for the kids to wreck. The kids. He always said it in the plural, hopeful, like a man laying track toward a future he intended to arrive at.

He made every mortgage payment from wherever in the world he was, wired in on time, without fail, a man building a home for a family he was mostly too far away to live in.

I think about those weeks home more than anything else now.

They had a strange doubled quality, those leaves — he’d come back thinned out and wary, moving quiet through the house for the first few days, sleeping badly, flinching at the wrong sounds, and then slowly, the way ice goes off a pond, he’d thaw back into himself, into the man who sang badly while he sanded cabinet doors and made terrible jokes about the crown molding.

We did not have a normal marriage.