My brother Dwight spent twenty years building a canoe in his workshop, and he was still sanding the wood when he passed away this past February. We always thought it was just a hobby, but when his grandson finally picked up the sandpaper last Sunday, he found a cassette tape hidden deep under the bow.

It had a note taped to the front: “For whoever finishes her.” I am sitting here in the dark because I know exactly what is on that tape, and I am the one who kept it hidden.

Dwight was a man of precise, boring habits. He worked as a carpenter in our little river town in southern Illinois for forty-two years. He liked his coffee black, his shop door locked, and his cedar planks planed until they felt like silk. When his wife passed back in 1994, he started that canoe. He said it was for his granddaughter, but the years just kept slipping by.

The shop always smelled the same. It was a mix of sawdust, machine oil, and that sharp, clean scent of shaved cedar. He would spend his Saturday mornings out there while the rest of us were at church or grocery shopping. He never rushed anything. He would spend three hours just getting the curve of the gunwale right.

I remember stopping by back in 2003 with a plate of lemon bars. I found him sitting on an overturned bucket, just staring at the hull. He looked older then. He had this way of touching the wood like it was something holy. I asked him if he ever thought about just finishing it and taking it out on the water. He didn’t even look at me. “She’s not ready,” he said. That was all I got.

The thing is, I knew why he stopped. I knew, and I let him believe it was just his own perfectionism.

It started in the summer of 1992. I was helping him clear out some old boxes in the attic, and I stumbled across a stack of letters. They weren’t addressed to his wife. They were addressed to a woman named Clara who lived two towns over. I was curious, I guess. I opened one. It was all about how he was planning to leave everything behind, how he had bought a small plot of land in Missouri, and how he was just waiting for the right moment.

I didn’t tell a soul. I should have. But I was scared of what it would do to our family. I watched him every day after that, wondering if he was going to walk out the door. He never did. He just started working on that boat instead.

I thought if I didn’t say anything, it would just fade away. And for a long time, it did. He became the quiet, steady man we all knew. He doted on his kids and he never mentioned Clara again. But the boat kept growing, inch by slow inch.