It held a hundred or so small drawings on cheap penny sketch paper. They had a juvenile quality to them, a kind of childish, overly detailed look, like a Disney cartoon, too earnest. I didn’t like them at all—they seemed very teenage, illustrated—and many of them were signed Maria. The next box held assorted photos of a young couple in the late 1970s, camping with two little toddlers, a boy and a girl; the same images that had been on the sketches, clearly drawn from these photographs. Halfway through the pile of photos, sliding them through my fingers like they were playing cards, I stopped and closed it back up. This stuff wasn’t Carey’s—it looked like a Goodwill haul, the kind you’d pick up in bulk for collage work—and still I’d gone through it like a hungry dog rooting through the trash. I was bitterly disappointed. There was nothing to get, not from this, and I was embarrassed on her behalf, this Maria girl, for her terrible work. Don’t let this trash get into your brain, I told myself, and shoved the boxes against the wall and tried to banish them from my consciousness.

The next five days were, as I expected, physically agonizing—worse. The lumber, forklifted inside the barn doors, was shrink-wrapped to the pallets in tall cubes, and I had to climb up the ladder to get the top sheets down. Eighty-three pounds is difficult enough when you’re on solid ground, harder still when you’re balanced on an aluminum staircase, so I broke two sheets in half—dropping them and watching them bend in slow motion, snapping and splintering—before getting the hang of it. Once they were down from the pile, they needed to be dragged across the expanse of the studio, which I did using one of the couch cushions and a drop cloth (it turned black in about five minutes) before angling them onto their sawhorses. I did this twenty-four times, and then I spent the entire next day with a makeshift table saw (a circular saw clamped to a sawhorse) making angled cuts on one-by-fours for the framing. I screwed framing to each panel—performed eight times per panel, twenty-four panels—192 repetitions of the same action.