The Last Beach Bungalow by Jennie Nash

mom.”
    Rick squeezed Jackie’s hand and smiled at her—a smile full of obvious sorrow that a ten-year-old would have a memory like that in her head—then turned back toward me. “You said that it would be a shame to have to die in such a shabby house.”
    I nodded. “I do remember saying that.”
    “You said that we’d waited too long to build our dream house.”
    “Well, yeah,” I said, “because we had such big plans when we moved in here.”
    “And I’ve spent far too much time building other people’s dream houses,” he said. “Now it’s our turn.” He handed me the paper.
    I slipped off the bow, knowing exactly what I would find inside. Blue lines crisscrossing blue paper, outlining a big, open kitchen, an office with built-in everything and a huge master bath oriented perfectly to capture the morning sun. Glass would be called out for the entire wall facing the ocean and sandblasted beams for the entryway. There would be bamboo floors, granite counters, tumbled marble tile in a kitchen with hand-rubbed oversized cabinets. He had done all this work while I was in the hospital, while I was waiting for toxic chemicals to drip into my veins, while I was throwing up, while I was asleep.
    “Are you serious?” I asked quietly.
    Rick nodded. He leaned down, buried his face in my neck and held on to the arm on my good side. “I love you so much,” he said. When he lifted his face it was wet, and the look on Jackie’s face was one of absolute terror. Her dad hadn’t said one word about building a house before it was too late. He hadn’t said one single thing about building a house as a fortress against an uncertain future. But her dad had cried. He didn’t have to speak.
    When I was done with chemo, many months later, Rick submitted the plans to the city. We lived in an area that requires you to flag all additions and remodels for six months to give the neighbors time to complain if you’re blocking their views. We sailed through that trial, but turned up an engineering problem on the back property line and had to build a retaining wall before we could proceed with the house itself. Grief delayed us next. Rick’s parents were sideswiped by a semitruck on their way home from a Dodger game. Their car flipped, it rolled, and they were dead by the time the paramedics came.
    It was one of those accidents you hear about on rush-hour radio with numbing regularity, but you never think that someone’s parents died; you always just think of how jammed the freeway’s going to be. Rick’s older brother, Dennis, got the call from the California Highway Patrol, but Dennis lived five hundred miles away. It was Rick who went to identify the bodies, and Rick who sat down with the minister to pick the hymns and prayers for the memorial service and Rick who ushered his parents’ wills through a year of probate. By the time we were whole enough again to think about working on the house, it was nearly four years from the day when Rick gave me the plans. And now here it was, a week until we moved back in, just a week before the Christmas of Jackie’s junior year in high school, the week I was five-years free of cancer, and we were sitting in a hospital waiting room just like we had before.
    “Thank you,” Rick said, dismissing my praise about his smoothness with clients and my fears about the house. “And don’t worry. You’re going to adore this house.” He kissed my hand, and then leaned over to pick up Car and Driver off the waiting room coffee table.
    A minute later, I said, “I think Jackie has a boyfriend,” but Rick didn’t hear me. He was so engrossed in a three-year -old article about Toyota’s plans for world domination that I could have started belting out the National Anthem and he wouldn’t have heard me. “I think they’re pretty serious,” I continued, “or at least physical. I think that’s it. I think they’re physical.” I caught a movement out of the corner of my eye. When I glanced