Remmy Jackson's kitchen was the antithesis of Lloyd's spacious gourmet paradise. The Jackson kitchen was small and cluttered, and the appliances were old and worn, looking like they might have been inherited from Remmy's late mother.

Nor did Remmy have an enormous woodworking shop adjacent to her tiny frame house, which was how Lloyd came to be spread across her scarred Formica breakfast counter, working on his plans for playground equipment.

"You have a visitor," said Remmy from the kitchen doorway.

"Don't have time to chat," said Lloyd, without looking up from his work.

Remmy backed out of the doorway and another person took her place. "I didn't come to chat, I came to help."

Lloyd slammed his open hand down onto the strewn papers and stared blindly at the countertop as if he would like to bang his head against it repeatedly. "And what do you think you can do to help, Charlotte Bates?"

"I have this week off because the wedding's on Friday, I once built a folly all by myself, mostly, and I can drive a truck."

Lloyd turned slowly and fixed her with a look. "Won't Dandy Dan be expecting you to spend this week getting ready for the wedding?"

"I just have to show up at the Courthouse Annex at two o'clock on Friday the 15th. This'll all be over by then anyway, right?" She gestured to the playground plans.

Lloyd dropped his eyes and nodded with a wry smile; it would be over, all right.

"Okay, then," Charley continued. "Tomorrow we load up your workshop and bring it over to Remmy's garage. So, get some sleep. I'll expect you to pull your weight in the morning."

She left before he could respond. He came out of his stupor and took two steps in pursuit of her, but he heard the front door close in the distance, and he stopped. He turned in a full circle in the middle of the tiny kitchen, unable to decide what to do.

Deciding to take Charley's advice, he removed a pencil he had balanced behind one ear, placed it on top of his paper pile, and took himself off to bed.

Remmy's garage was a fraction of the size of Lloyd's own workshop, but Lloyd and Charley managed to pile tools, playground modules, and building supplies higgledy-piggledy to the rafters of the garage, spilling the excess halfway down the driveway.

The battered, mammoth Jackson family station wagon had to content itself with sleeping at the curb over the next several days as Lloyd and Charley worked from sunrise until long after dark building playground equipment.

On Wednesday night, Lloyd and Charley, wearing worn jeans and covered with sweat and sawdust, worked on two different ends of a crawl-through sea serpent. Yellow light from the garage's ceiling fixture spread a shadow-streaked glow through the open garage door and down the crowded driveway.

They had been sanding the sea serpent by hand until Charley reached for an electric circular sander and moved to plug it in.

"What do you think you're doing?!" Lloyd shouted.

"I've got to take down some rough spots—" she began.

"Then put on a mask! How many times do I have to tell you what fiberglass does to your lungs?"

Charley stiffened, then carefully put down the power sander and brushed sawdust from her jeans. "It's after eleven. I'll see you tomorrow." She retrieved her tote bag from a corner of the garage, hefted her car keys, and walked past him on her way to the curb and her waiting truck.

Lloyd kept sanding his end of the sea serpent. "You need to stay home and rest tomorrow," he said without looking in her direction. "It's the day before your wedding."

"I don't mind—"

"Don't come back," he interrupted her for the second time in as many minutes. "Just, uh, just don't."

Charley waited at the edge of the yellow beams of light, but he would not look at her. He kept sanding.

"Y'know," she said, "you could've stayed at my house instead of halfway across town at Remmy's. We would've been close to the workshop, and you could have seen the kids every day when they came for music lessons."

"Little late to think of that now."

"Oh, I thought of it then, but you would've said no."

Lloyd kept sanding. He would not answer.

Charley stepped close enough for him to feel her breath on his shoulder, but he ignored her.

"Even now, if I said, 'Lloyd, come to my house. Get some sleep,' you'd say no."

"Yeah, and what would Dandy Dan say?" he nearly spat at her.

"I told you. Dan fell in love with my grandmother's house full of antiques before he ever even looked at me. Even now, I'm just convenient for him, and he's nice to me. The business will be his one day, and I really think I'm just part of the business to him."

Lloyd kept sanding.

"I guess I've misjudged the situation," she said with a tight, aching throat. "It wouldn't matter even if there were no Dan, would it."

The motion of his hands ceased, but he did not lift the sanding block from the wood. He did not look at her. "Go home, Charley," he said quietly with no inflection. "Have a nice wedding. Have a wonderful life. You deserve it."

She stormed past him back into the garage, where she picked up the discarded power sander, placed it in its storage box, and slammed the lid as hard as humanly possible. Then she stomped past Lloyd toward the driveway.

He started sanding again.

A few feet past him Charley turned, with angry tears in her eyes, and snapped, "You think you've got a problem because your kitchen talks!"

"Not the whole kitch—"

"The problem is not that the kitchen talks, it's that you don't. That's your problem. You won't tell me why you won't hire a lawyer. You won't tell me why we can't be together even though you know Dan doesn't love me like y—Stop that!"

He kept sanding, pulling and pushing the sanding block with more energy than the task required.

She gave up all restraint and wept copiously, squeezing out the words, "You can't finish in time anyway! Why are you even still working on it?"

Lloyd pressed his hands harder against the wood. "It keeps my mind off my kids," he said honestly, "and my hands off you."

When he still refused to even look in her direction, Charley spun and ran into the night.

When Lloyd could no longer hear the sound of her truck's engine rushing away from him, he dropped the sanding block and sat hard in the sawdust on the driveway's cold asphalt. Sitting Indian-style, with his elbows on his knees, he dropped his head into his hands and stayed there a long time.

When he had gathered himself together, he rose and extinguished the yellow garage light and went inside the house. Finished for the night. He feared all the ways he might indeed be finished. With all of it. For always.