Raising the Titanic

I spent the winter my father died down in the basement, under the calm surface of the floorboards, hundreds of little plastic parts spread out like debris on the table. And for months while the snow fell and my father sat in the big chair by the Philco, dying, I worked my way up deck by deck, story by story, from steerage to first class, until at last it was done, stacks, deck chairs, all the delicate rigging. And there it loomed, a blazing city of the dead. Then painted the gaping hole at the waterline and placed my father at the railings, my mother in a lifeboat pulling away from the wreckage.