The iron straps were painted white over their rust. The tulips, the wedding year, the banner with the almost-gone name, all of it had been sealed and buried.
Nobody spoke.
Then Renata said, in a very small voice, “I’m sorry. I thought it would look better than this. He said he’d only touched the surface.”
I said, “Renata. Come here.”
I took her hand and ran her fingers along the side of the lid, where the white was thinnest, and I said, “Feel that.”
She felt it.
I said, “That is not a surface. That is paint over shellac over paint. Whoever did this sealed the old tulips before he buried them, and shellac comes off in alcohol. I have a shop full of it. Alden Kvam may have been a fool, but he was a careful fool. Everything he did can be undone.”
I said, “Everything he did can be taken back out.”
She looked at me. I saw that she understood I was not talking only about the chest.
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I said, “Will you help me?”
She said she did not know how, she had not touched a piece in years.
I said, “Your hands know how.”
We started that night, with denatured alcohol, plastic scrapers, a card scraper, and a stack of rags under the work lights over the big bench. Renata put on one of Ebbe’s old shop aprons from the hook by the door. It came to her knees.
She stood over the chest a long moment, then laid the first wet rag across the white of the lid, and I watched my daughter’s shoulders drop an inch for the first time in eight years.
On Friday we stripped the front, which took most of the day, and on Saturday morning, a little before ten, a pale blue showed through under the scraper. Then red. The first tulip came up out of the white like a face coming up out of water.
Renata set down the scraper. She put her hand flat on the front of the chest, over the tulip, exactly where I had put mine eight years before, and she said, “Mom, it’s all still here.”
I said, “It was never gone. It was just waiting for somebody to stop being in a hurry.”
On Sunday morning, before church, we carried the chest into the back bay.
I had torn the drop cloth off the finished room on Friday night, and I will not describe Renata’s face when she saw it, because some things belong only to the person who had them. She walked among the seven pieces without a word.
She sat on the little rocker, which was far too small for her, and rocked once. She looked at the school desk with the inkwell hole and began to laugh and cry at the same time.
She said, “You kept it all.”
I said, “I did not keep it. I fixed it. There’s a difference, and it took me eight years to learn it.”
Dannick and the Tjaden boys lifted the chest, still half stripped, with its blue and its red coming through the white in patches, and set it on the concrete at the foot of the spool bed, in the gap I had measured.
Anders stood in front of it with his hands behind his back. He said, “It looks like a map.”
I said, “What do you mean?”
He said, “You can see where it got fixed, and where it got hurt, and where it still has to get fixed.” He thought. “It’s a good map.”