“Babe, don’t freak out. But I think I left my passport at home.”
I stared at my husband.
We were standing in the middle of Terminal B at six-fifty in the morning. Our suitcases were already checked. Our boarding passes were on my phone. I had a coffee in one hand and a little bag of airport almonds in the other, and I’d been feeling, for the first time in a very long time, something close to happy.
“Dereck,” I said. “You’re joking.”
“I wish I was.”
He patted the front pocket of his jacket. Then the inside pocket. Then his back pockets. Then the side pocket of his carry-on bag. Then the front pocket of his jacket again, like it might have grown a passport in the last fifteen seconds.
He muttered something under his breath.
We’d spent six months planning this trip.
Our sixth wedding anniversary. Ten days in Portugal. Lisbon first, then down the coast to a little white town on the cliffs that I’d found on a travel blog at two in the morning back in March. I’d saved a picture of it on my phone. White houses. Blue doors. The ocean underneath, so clear you could see the rocks on the bottom.
“That’s where we’re going,” I’d told Dereck, holding up my phone in bed.
He’d looked at it and smiled. “Okay.”
“Really?”
“Really. You need it, Sheila. We both do.”
He’d been right. I did need it. It had been a hard three years.
The flight was scheduled to leave at 9:05.
And now Dereck had forgotten the one thing he absolutely, positively could not get on a plane without.
“Where did you last see it?” I asked.
He rubbed his forehead. “Probably in our bedroom. In my drawer. I took it out last night to check the expiration date.”
“And you didn’t put it back in your bag?”
“I thought I did.”
He stopped. He looked toward the big sliding glass doors at the front of the terminal. Toward the taxi line outside.
“Actually,” he said, “I’ll just go back and get it.”
“You’ll never make it,” I said. “It’s forty minutes each way. Plus security. Plus traffic.”
“I can try.”
“My mom lives ten minutes from our house,” I said. I was already pulling out my phone. “I’ll call her. She still has our spare key. She can grab it and bring it straight here.”
“No, Sheila.”
His answer came too fast.
Way too fast. Before I’d even finished the sentence.
I looked up at him.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” he said. He shifted his bag from one shoulder to the other. “Nothing’s wrong. I just don’t want to bother Vivienne. It’s seven in the morning.”
“Mom won’t mind. She’s always up at five.”
“Seriously, babe.” He reached out and put his hand on my arm. “I can handle it. Let me handle it.”
I was already dialing.
My mother answered on the second ring. She sounded cheerful. She always sounds cheerful in the morning. It’s one of the most annoying things about her.
“Shouldn’t you be on your way to paradise right now?”
“Not quite, Mom,” I said. “Dereck forgot his passport.”
“Oh, dear.”
“Could you do me a huge favor? Could you go to our house and check his bedside drawer? The one on his side of the bed. If you leave now and bring it straight to the airport, we still have time.”
“Of course, honey. I’m putting on my shoes right now.”
“You’re a lifesaver.”
“I know,” she said. “Tell Dereck he owes me a bottle of port.”
I laughed and hung up.
Dereck was watching me.
“She agreed?” he said.
“Yes. She’s leaving now.”
He rubbed the back of his neck.
“Great,” he said.
But he didn’t sound relieved.
He sounded like a man who’d just watched somebody walk toward a door he’d locked.
I noticed it. I didn’t know what it meant. I didn’t think about it very long.
I’d been married to him for six years. I trusted him.
We sat down at a little table by the coffee shop to wait.
Dereck didn’t drink his coffee. He kept checking his phone. He’d look at it, then put it face down on the table, then pick it up again thirty seconds later.
“You okay?” I asked.
“Yeah. Just stressed. I hate being late.”
“She’ll make it. She drives like a maniac. You know that.”
He smiled. It was a thin smile.
“Yeah,” he said. “I know.”
I should tell you about my father.
Because none of what happened that morning makes sense unless you understand him.
His name was Gene Callahan, and he was a carpenter.
Not the kind who builds big fancy houses. The other kind. The kind who repairs things. He fixed furniture. He built kitchen cabinets for people who couldn’t afford the ones at the big home stores. He rebuilt porch steps for old ladies on our street and charged them in pie.
If something was broken in our neighborhood, people called Dad. A wobbly table. A cracked chair. A door that wouldn’t close. A drawer that stuck.
He always came. He never once said no.
His workshop was in our garage. He’d taken over the whole thing when I was little, and my mother had been parking in the driveway ever since without a single complaint.
It smelled like sawdust and wood stain and lemon furniture polish. There was a radio on the shelf that only played one station, an oldies station, and he sang along to every song, badly.
I spent my whole childhood out there.
I’d sit on an upside-down paint bucket in the corner and watch him work. When I was old enough, he started teaching me.
How to read a tape measure. How to sand with the grain, never against it. How to tell a good board from a bad one by tapping it with your knuckle and listening.
“Measure twice,” he’d say. “Cut once.”
“I know, Dad.”
“Then say it.”
“Measure twice. Cut once.”
“Good girl.”
And the most important thing he taught me:
“Fix it if you can, Sheila. Don’t throw it away just because it’s broken. Most things can be fixed if you’ve got the patience.”
He carried a brass measuring tape in his shirt pocket every single day of his life.
It was old. Older than me. The brass was worn smooth on one side where his thumb rested. The tape inside had faded from yellow to almost white. He’d had it since he was nineteen, when his own father gave it to him on his first day as a carpenter’s apprentice.
He used it for everything. Not just work. He’d measure the turkey at Thanksgiving. He’d measure how much I’d grown on my birthday and mark it on the inside of the pantry door. He measured the distance between our two front porch chairs once, to prove to my mother they weren’t too close together.
“See?” he said. “Thirty-two inches. That’s the perfect distance for holding hands.”
My mother rolled her eyes. She also never moved the chairs again. 