Tom burst into the room, tossed down a pile of letters and advertisements, brandished a giant package. His face shone like a child's on Christmas morning. "Look what came! The Victory!"
Emily was buried to her wrists in potting soil. Really, this violet had always been sickly maybe if she put it on the back porch. "What?"
Tom produced his pen knife and slit the wrapping paper with a flourish. "The Victory. Nelson's flagship."
The leaf here, and this root there. "They sent it all the way from Southampton?" she inquired, distracted.
"Portsmouth. It's in Portsmouth. We spent our twentieth anniversary there, remember?"
"Trying to keep Brian off the mainmast," Emily responded with a laugh. She brushed off her hands and turned. "Oh the new model!"
A definitive rip of paper, and Tom held an oblong box illustrated with a garish battle at sea cannon smoke, shattered masts, bodies flailing in crimson-flecked water. "Trafalgar," he sighed. "Nelson dying in glory."
"If he'd kept his head down," said Emily, "he wouldn't have died."
Tom didn't hear her. Slowly, savoring the moment, he opened the box. A mound of smaller boxes, thin slabs of balsa wood, sticks and vials of glue and paint. He regarded it all, his face sobering, and announced, "I was a fool to order one this complicated. This big. I'll never finish it."
"You said that about the other ones." Emily glanced at the living room mantel and the neat flotilla arranged thereon. "You've been wanting this one to be the flagship of your fleet."
"Well, yes."
She smiled; he was a child, wanting reassurance. Little enough to give.
Tom found the instructions, a thick booklet, pages of close-set type. "I'll be damned," he exclaimed. "It's in Italian."
Oh no. Her heart sank for him. "You'll have to send it back."
But his chin was set, his eyes gleaming. "No. I'll figure it out. It has pictures, and I've done the other ones." Still muttering, he carried the box into the little room off the kitchen that was his shop.
Emily leaned on the sink, watching Brian and his basketball in the driveway
God, he was growing tall and lanky, have to raise the goal--but no, he was off to college in the fall. She listened to the ordered thumps of the ball against the concrete, and the click and jingle of the tools in the workroom.
"Now," she said quietly to herself, "now. Stop time now...."
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