It wasn’t until later that it hit me. The thump. It hadn’t been a car door slamming. The shitty porch had finally done its job.

“Come and see, come and see!”

It was a luminous spring day, a little over a year since the project had begun. The smell of newly sawed wood and fresh paint hung over us and gave the fresh air a pleasant, sharp edge. The three of us were standing alone outside the finished apartment building. Everyone else had gone. Above us was blue, periwinkle sky and clouds with glowing, gossamer edges. Wind. Everything was turning green and being born, blooming.

Brenda was speaking, my phantom assistant. I had met her for only the second or third time minutes prior. I was surprised to find she was dressed so well—a black suit with a tie, very striking. She held a clipboard and something digital in her hands that probably contained all of the binders of information she had printed out for me, which now rested on multiple shelves in the empty living room of the main house. “We’re so excited to give you the official tour,” she said in a perfectly modulated, professional tone. Ray stood beside her, silent as ever.

He looked bashful in the sunshine. Brenda looked at him and nodded, and he handed me the keys with a pleased, lopsided grin. Without a crowd it seemed silly, ridiculous, like handing keys to a child. But that is what I felt like! I felt barely contained within myself. He explained the keys one by one: the Ropers’ apartment (101, first floor on the end), Apartment 201 (second floor on the end), Larry’s apartment in 304 (third floor, fourth apartment). There were three other apartments in the building seen in the series only once—Lesley the ventriloquist’s in “The Charming Stranger,” Bob and Carol’s apartment in “Bob and Carol and Larry and Terri,” and Arlene the painter’s apartment in “Jack Takes Off.” The keys to those quarters were also on the ring; there were several other copies of this set of keys, to be hidden away by me at my leisure.

I was so giddy I might have been on nitrogen gas. I probably looked deranged, with the way I felt my face contorting. Professional Brenda refused to make full eye contact with me. She seemed like one of those people accustomed to dealing with crazies, who had made a career of tactfully ignoring the worst of other people’s neuroses for a certain dollar amount. I probably would have hated her in my past life, but who cared! Not I! I snatched the keys from Ray’s hand (yes, I am moderately ashamed to recall my eagerness) and walked toward the door nearest me, the Ropers’ apartment.

Just as in the series, here were two small steps leading up to the brown tile porch area! And here was the door! Exclamation marks exploded inside my brain like fireworks. I unlocked the door and stepped inside.

It all was there—the gray lamp to the left of the door, the Whymper pheasant prints and Wysocki folk art on the wall off to the right, the small imitation Duncan Phyfe tables, the glass-front bookcase cabinet. The cream-colored Queen Anne’s couch and coffee table, the orange carpet, the gold curtains. All the tacky knickknackery was there—quintessentially 1970s, with signs of the then-recent Bicentennial (Colonial men and women curtsying, a flag-emblazoned collector’s plate), eagle-marked cups. The linen slub sheers on the windows. Oh god. I could have sobbed. It was here, and it was real.