The world isn’t supposed to work like that.
But maybe it does.
When we pull up the old driveway, a group of men in yellow hats wave to us. “Who’re they?”
“The construction crew.” His words lift a thousand pounds off my shoulders. With a quick chuckle, he drives off-road, toward the back of the house. “You didn’t think I’d literally make you build a house with me alone, did you?”
I shift in my seat, the skin on my back brushing against the leather and I cringe as a lightning bolt of pain sears my flesh. I suck in a quick breath, counting as the pain fades.
“You okay?”
Ten … Eleven … Twelve. I let the air out slowly. Only twelve seconds this time. “Yeah, they’re getting shorter.”
“All right then. You ready?”
I nod, grabbing the handle to ease myself out of the truck. All the debris is gone now. Other than the few pieces of remaining cinderblock foundation and the stone hearth, you’d never know there’d been a house here. Huge piles of new boards, blocks, and a cement mixer stand where our front living room used to.
“Chris,” A man hollers from across the yard. “Plan A or B? The board bent to give us both permits, but we need the decision today.”
Dad looks down at me. “A or B?”
“Umm, B?” “B!” Dad shouts back.
“What’s the difference?” I ask while he unloads his tools from the truck.
“You’ll see.”
“Wait, is it like a bad versus good difference?" Because, I can’t handle an epic decision resting on me right now. What if plan A is the original floor plan and plan B includes a larger bedroom for me? My breathing quickens and air can’t enter easily. The coughing begins and I’m forced to bend over and grab my knees, desperate to get more air through. Dad dives into my bag, fumbling to get the spacer attached. It falls to the ground but I don’t care. I grab the med and poof it into my mouth in a slow deep breath. I cough a bit more before I do another. A few breaths later, and it’s like my lungs throw their doors open.
There. Air and my inhaler— my new best friends, especially since Gina’s gone AWOL since dating Josh.
“Feeling better?” Dad asks.
My heart races but this time my breathing stays steady. I don’t know what to think. Why would he leave this choice to me? He must value my opinion, but if he did, wouldn’t he tell me the components of the plan. “Dad, please. Choose the one you want.” He has to know that I’m not planning on staying here. It’s got to be his decision.
“B is my favorite. We’re sticking with that.” He yanks out a large canvas bag from the truck bed, tossing it over his shoulder. It clanks as he shifts to hull his tool box out. It’s weird watching him lift so effortlessly, sometimes I forget that he’s a strong cowboy. I follow him into the area I imagine was once our bathroom. Dad flips the bag over and large metal poles crash to the ground. He reaches in, pulling out a large bit of green canvas.
“A tent?”
“Yup. You can’t work and hold an umbrella, and I can’t have the sun getting you. Doctor’s orders.”
I don’t know whether to be thankful or embarrassed so I nod. All these younger construction guys will think I’m a wuss if I have to stay under the tent all day. But, the sun beating down on my back sounds way too excruciating. I know this tent’ll become my saving grace. I’ll just have to deal with the sickly girl persona and let the guys judge.
…Not that I need to impress them anyway. Still, it’d be nice to not need anything.
Dad hands me some poles and tells me where to put what. In a matter of minutes, we’ve assembled an open-air tent.
“So what next?”
“We dig.”
“What?”
“A hole.”
He returns to the truck, bringing back a shovel and a can of spray paint. I shield my eyes as he sprays small, purple circles on the ground, all equidistant apart. Shovels lie at our feet, and I can’t help but glance at the guys with a claw truck a few feet away. I suppress a groan. Of course we’ll be shoveling.
“Here you go.” He hands me a bottle of water before he jams the shovel into the ground. With a quick grunt, his foot levers the dust and dirt from the earth.
“So when you mean ‘we dig’?”
“I mean,” he digs the shovel in again. “I dig and you drink.”
“Right.” Awesome, my entire day will be spent watching my father dig a hole.
“So,” he says. “How’s your art coming along?”
“Fine,” I shrug, but my heart picks up its beat. There’s no denying that painting this heap of beams and ash changed something in me—I can’t stop creating.
Colt’s tree in charcoal.
Grace’s hair blowing in the breeze.
The wrinkles around my Dad’s eyes.
My pieces have come alive.
I eye Dad, his wrinkles now in the shade of his cowboy hat. He’s clueless I sketch him. He was such an easy subject, now a permanent stoic fixture on Grace’s front porch, I couldn’t let those story-telling wrinkles go untold.
“Do you mind sharing your sketchbook with me someday?”
“Oh, sure. I assumed you’d already looked.” I leave the sketchbook everywhere. The paintings are in my room, but I want access to the sketchbook at all times now I’ve found the secret to making things pop. It’s always available. Colt’s little brother, Chase, looks through it all the time.
“No. I haven’t opened it, but I’d like to.” He wipes his forehead before jumping on the shovel to get a little deeper. “Last scoop,” he grunts while he jumps and lifts, dirt flicking up in the air. “There. Now the boards. I’ll need your help here.”
“Sure,” I follow him out from under the tent to the truck bed. Eight large square-ended boards lie at the bottom.
“Can you handle the end of this six by six?” he asks as he guides the board into my arms. It’s not too heavy. “Another?” I nod yes and another slips in. He grabs a handsaw while carrying the other ends back under the tent.
“Dad, what are we building?”
“You’ll figure it out.”
I draw a circle through the dust with my toe. For real? I’m so sick of these secrets.
“Hold here,” he hands me the end to hold while he measures and saws them clean apart. The saw work vibrates the bones in my wrist. “Hang on a sec.” He returns to his truck, this time coming back with a wheel barrel full of bags and jugs of water. “Cement,” he explains. He tips the supplies on the ground before ripping open a bag and pouring it back into the wheel barrel. Water follows, then he uses the shovel to mix it together.
“Why aren’t we using the cement mixer the construction dudes have?”
“That thing? Naw. I like it this way. I can feel when the cement is right. Ya know? I prefer the hands on approach.”
"Oh," I say. I’ve never gotten that mentality. It’s like saying you’d prefer to make your own bread when you live above a fresh bakery.
"It's more fun." He digs his shovel into the mix.
I sit, drawing a rose in the dust while Dad turns the mixture over and over with his shovel. I can’t believe I left my sketchpad on the kitchen counter, I thought I’d be doing more than watching. Not that I can complain, it’s not like I wanted to do any building anyway.
“All right,” Dad holds out his hand. It’d be too rude for me to refuse it so I let him pull me up. “Can you hold this?” He slides one of the boards into the hole. The plank, as high as my chin, provides the perfect head rest while I hold it in place. Dad looks at me with an eye roll, “Sure, that works. Just keep the board still and straight.”
He fills the hole with cement and grabs a level, taking the timber from me and knocking it in place. We stand there for a while as he tests the cement’s hold until the board sticks stiff.
“There we go. Solid as a rock.” He stretches his back, blocking the sun, so he becomes a silhouette. “Now three more.” He moves to the next hole, but I’m str
uck at how clean and odd the new board, set straight among a pile of ashes and dust, appears. It’s like I lived this before, but that’s impossible.
“Why do we need the cement Dad? What does it do?”
“It helps build a strong foundation so nothing will fall.”
“Oh.” I say as I plunge a stick into the bucket of sandy grey goo. “But how?”
Dad sighs, wiping the sweat from his nose. Mom taps the window, laughing from behind her laptop. She’s working a lot today.
“The sand and limestone bond with the water, becoming a solid.” He knocks the board that towers above me around in the hole with the cement.
“Oh, like when I make play dough?”
“Right.”
“Dad,” I ask again, rolling the gooey stick in the grass, parts of the cement turn white now. “Why is it turning white?”
“It’s drying.”
“But why does it change color?”
Dad laughs. “You’ve got a lot of questions, Bug. Can you hand me that shovel?”
“Time to dig another hole?” I say as I drag the shovel to him. I grab my pink gardening shovel too. Dad says I’m an expert at moving dirt.
“Yup.”
“What are we building?” I try to plunge the end of my shovel in, lifting some grass from the earth.
Dad laughs, “Whoa, girl. We can’t dig just anywhere. Let’s redirect that energy over here.” He points to the circle he spray-painted earlier bright orange.
“You should have gone with purple, it’s way better than orange.”
“I know. Purple next time, ok babe?”
“Promise?”
“I do.”
“A deck,” I whisper.
“What’s that, Autumn?” Dad says as he pulls out another mound of dry earth. The purple spray painted dirt clings to the back of his shovel.
“We’re building a deck, right?”
“Yup. I knew you’d catch on.”
He remembered the paint. My eyes itch and I take a deep breath. This isn’t the place to cry. I rub my nose, trying to get rid of the pre-tear sting.
“You all right?” Dad asks.
“It's allergies.”
Come mid-morning, we’ve finished grounding the support posts. My back itches, the heat from the sun still finding my burns through the canvas shield. Dad keeps things simple as we work. He occasionally asks about New York, the online school, and Mom. I’m surprised he doesn’t seem to have a hard time listening to me talk about her. He nods along while he nails up support boards, but his face dulls when I mention how Mom always left me alone on business trips.
“I think that’ll be it today,” he says after I tell him about her last trip to London. He tosses the level towards the toolbox. It bounces out and he swears.
The atmosphere tightens. I pick up the level and place it in the box. Suddenly, I’m finding myself contemplating Grace’s advice.
Fight for him.
He remembered the purple paint.
“Dad.” I take a deep breath as I pull my fingers through the box of nails, aligning them in their row. “You know Mom isn’t negligent, right?” I hand him the box.
“I do. Ms. Kent watched you.”
Oh. “I didn’t know you knew that.”
“She called me twice a day. I like Ms. Kent. She was my choice.”
“You chose her to watch me?”
“Yup.” He sets his toolbox in the truck bed, tossing in the empty cement mix bags behind it.
“Why?”
“Well, your mother wouldn’t let me come out, but I won the flight to choose your sitter.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t know Mom wouldn’t have let you. I would—” There’s a desperate ache from deep inside of me.… If he could have been there those nights, everything would have been so much better. I wouldn't have felt so alone. “—I would have liked you being there.”
My heart stalls when I realize what I’ve just said-- the truth.
“Me too,” Dad says, propping his elbow on a shovel.
“Why is Mom still so hard on you? She never acted weird about you around me. I thought it all ended, well… smoothly."
Dad helps me into the truck. “Well, that’s nice. Your mom wants to keep her distance because I broke her trust. I can’t blame her. I deserve worse, honestly.” He gives my knee a squeeze once I’m in the seat. “I’m thankful for the time I had with you and thrilled to see the lady you’ve become.”
He closes the door, waves goodbye to the construction crew leader, and slides in behind the wheel. He starts the ignition then shakes his head, turning the key backwards. The engine stills. “When I betrayed your mother, I broke her heart. I broke my own heart. I don’t deserve her and I don’t deserve you. She knows this. I can’t blame her.”
“But…” I really don’t know what I’m saying. When I think of Mom, I agree with him, but when I think of me, I’m lost. Is it possible to think of the situations as separate?
“The thing is, I’m selfish. I’m still hoping I can keep part of you,” he says and then forces out a cough.
“I’m sorry, Dad. I’m just…”
“It’s okay. I understand.” He clears his throat, turning the ignition back on.
“No, it’s hard. Confusing. I’m totally…” my eyes burn and like magic, tears appear. “It's like I'm lost. I’m sorry,” I say, turning away to the window, wiping the tears away.
He stops the engine again. “I know, Autumn,” He taps his fingers on the steering wheel. “It will take time.”
“But I don’t have much time, do I?” My birthday is in one month.
He doesn’t answer, as Chuck, the lead of the construction crew, knocks on the side of the truck. “Having engine trouble?” he asks. I dare not look his direction; the last thing I want is someone else seeing me cry.
“Nope,” Dad says as he starts the truck. “She works beautifully. She just needed some time.”
We work at a creeping pace in the morning’s darkness. The hammer thuds against the board I’m holding, vibrating my arms. The construction crew won’t be helping today—it’s Saturday. But, here we are at five fifteen in the morning on a Saturday. When he finishes, I pick up my mug of dark heaven, sipping coffee. The first two cups got me out the door, and the third allows me to stand here.
“Can you hand me the drill?” He nods towards the toolbox, the light from his flashlight helmet beams on the yellow DeWalt. “Brace it here.”
I tug my work gloves back on, grasping the two corners of the frame we’re building. He’s determined to get one wall up before dawn. The dark sky is transitioning into a navy blue on the horizon, the moon fading above. He might make it. If we’re lucky, we may get half of the back exterior frames up before noon. At least, that’s his epic goal.
The drill begins and I squeeze the boards tight together. I’ve become an expert bracer in the last few days. We got half the deck built but abandoned the project as it edged closer to the home. We’ll finish that once we get these walls up.
“There.” Dad tries to wiggle the boards. They don’t budge. “Solid.”
I stand up, examining the wood beams in a square with a crisscross that lies on the cracked ground below.
“Nice.” I say, taking another sip of life juice before I yawn.
“Yup. Eight more to go.”
I eye the frame, this one two times as large, wondering how I’ll support it while he anchors it to the foundation. Not to mention the seven other massive ones.
“How do we get them standing?”
Dad shakes his head. “Eh, we’ll worry about that after we finish the framing.”
My mind clicks, buzzing pleasantly as its doors open to welcome the caffeine. “I don’t know,” I say. I reach my arm above my head. “There’s no way I can hold it all the way up.”
“It’ll work out.” He places a nail in his mouth, lips squeezing as he grabs another board from the truck.
It’ll work out? His words leave a sour taste. Why
do people say stuff like that? It’s such a passive way of approaching life. But that’s him, isn’t it? The caffeine pulses through me, dragging bitterness with it. I glare at Dad, the nail still jutting out of his mouth, and I want to shake him. We’ve spent three days working together, spending quality time, but mostly just nailing boards.
I did what Grace suggested. We had a short conversation about Mom. I went there, but he hasn’t uttered a word about them or us since.
Does he expect me to initiate everything?
My head pounds as all three cups of brew hit at once. The escalating heat doesn’t help either. It feels like someone’s pressing the DeWalt nail gun against my feet and doing target practice.
I massage my temples. This frickin’ blows. There’s no way I’m spending the rest of my summer fighting for a father who just thinks everything will work out. Not everything does. Sometimes the worst happens and all you have left are the ashes. Literally. Get up. Rebuild. Make an effort. You’ve got to fight for the things and people you love.
He offers the end of the board to me, nodding towards where I should line it up on the ground.
I stare at it. If I take it, I’m just going on with this insane five in the morning bonding time that’s leading nowhere. “Dad, this is ridiculous. Do we have to do this today?”
“If we get these walls built today, it’ll save close to one thousand dollars from insurance that I can put into the barn. So, yes. We do.” He doesn’t wait for me to grab the board, instead putting it on the ground himself.
“No. Not this.” I kick the dirt. “This.”
“I’m sorry?”
“This time together. I mean,” I touch the scar on my shoulder. “We don’t have to keep pretending.”
He grabs another board from the truck. This time not including me as he aligns it perpendicular to the other one. He grabs another board, spitting out that nail to gnaw on his inside cheek.
“See—I knew you didn’t need my help to lift those things.”
“Autumn. I know this summer hasn’t been fun for you, but I’m doing my best. Believe it or not, I enjoy spending time with you.” He extends the board. “Have a little faith, okay.”
Bring the Rain Page 14
