The best I have is this: for twenty-six years it was a hiding place, and it saved my life by being one, and I did not want to live in a house with a hiding place in it.

Toby came home that summer and we did the basement together.

My father’s old workroom down there had been a laundry overflow and a graveyard for paint cans for six years, and over eleven weeks we cleared it, boarded it, wired it, and put a bench down the long wall.

He was fifteen by then.

He did most of the wiring under supervision and all of the arguing without any.

It is a workshop now.