For I wanted dents in the walls, inconvenient layouts, all the mild absurdities one could expect to encounter in a run-down, dated apartment building that had been lived in for forty years. The four other draftsmen had not understood this.

The Three’s Company apartment building was an impossible space. Apartments and balconies disappeared and reappeared throughout the series; there were references to the building being a “house,” and then other times an entire complex. Even within the individual apartments that appeared on the show there were rooms that were mentioned but never seen, and other rooms that were left mysterious as to whether they existed at all, though logic dictated they should be there. I wanted this sense of strangeness to be reflected in the construction. The only certain things were the general layouts and dimensions of Apartment 201, the trio’s apartment; Apartment 101, the landlords’ apartment; and Apartment 304, Larry Dallas’s apartment; and that overall it would be a three-story, eighteen-unit building in the Spanish Colonial Revival style of Los Angeles in the early twentieth century—rounded edges and doorways, stuccoed walls, wrought-iron balconies, clay-tiled steps. I had memorized all these details, compiled them into a mental script, and I repeated it to Ray like a guru repeating a mantra.

He took it fine. As we sat in the living room, our legs crossed beneath our folding chairs, I could see the possibilities unfold in his head. “And above all else,” I added, animating my voice a little more, “I want you to understand that whatever you build, whatever you put into this, you’ll never see it again after it’s finished. And neither will anyone else. Just me.”

He had one of those pencils without an eraser, the sign of a true architect in my limited knowledge of what an architect should be, and when I made that declaration he placed the blunt end to his lips, gazing at the rough sketch I had handed him. He nodded. “I understand,” he said solemnly. “I like it,” he said, meaning, I think, that he liked that he would never see it again. I knew he was the one.

He then shook my hand and said he would get right to work, and he did. Within a month he had drawn up a blueprint we both agreed upon, the permits were acquired, ground was broken, and fifty men were on the job.

The project began.

The day I won the lottery, Krystal called me and asked if I wanted to go over to Geannie’s house again.

The house had remained mostly untouched until we’d started packing it up in July. Our progress had been slow because neither of us wanted to do it. “Let’s meet over there around three,” she said on the phone, and I agreed. It was a Saturday in October but the leaves stubbornly clung to the trees, unchanged. The sun kept going and going. My air conditioner continued to shudder on, probably on its last year of life, and my trailer still felt like an oven. The lottery drawing, announced live on television, was five hours away.