At night I would call your dad, who was working as a trim carpenter for his uncle’s contracting business in East Texas. He spent the day wiping sweat out of his eyes so he wouldn’t miss with the nail gun or the circular saw, finishing closets and chair rail and laying baseboard and trying not to keel over from heatstroke. We talked about how we’d never want to live in that kind of house, the two-car garage most of what you saw from the street. As if a house was mainly a place to keep your cars. We talked about that but not as if we assumed we would live together in a house. Not as a joint assertion of what we wanted for our unified future. Or maybe he did mean it that way but he knew I didn’t.