After Roman dropped off to sleep on Sunday night, I remembered something that Jag Fischer, my old boss and the wealthy owner of three magazines, had once told me. He was a small man with wide eyes, perfectly gelled gray hair, and a perfectly full money clip in his front left pocket.
“Banks are easy,” he had insisted. “Do two things and a bank will give you anything you want. First, you give them papers. Bury them with papers. Papers with dollar signs all over them mean you’re important. Doesn’t even matter if the dollar signs have little minus marks in front. To a bank, all dollar signs are golden.” He dropped his hand over his pocket, unconsciously patting his own dollar signs, something he did dozens of times a day. He was right; the dollars made him seem large and in charge. “Second, and this is most important, give the stuffy bastards a deadline. Time is money and you don’t want their old bank wasting yours. You need everything in two days—no more. Be eager and in charge. You make the rules, not them.” He had laughed, shaking his head and no doubt remembering a loan officer pushing his heavy glasses up and sweating over papers while Jag clapped and said, “Chop, chop! I don’t have all day. Gotta keep this money clip full.”
So I stayed up past bedtime gathering three years of tax returns, statements of intent, bills, royalty statements from a couple of small novels and newspapers, documents for energy-efficient roof decking, and a few manuscript pages from my latest mystery novel. It was an impressive stack, all neatly labeled in envelopes and folders. I added a completed loan application for an impressive-looking bank downtown where I had never had any type of account. I may have parked in their lot one time to dash into a nearby bookstore, but that was the closest thing to an affiliation I had with them.
Bright and early, I put on a gray skirt suit, one that had been a little tight until divorce stress claimed the last postbaby pounds. I wore a red shirt underneath, because red meant power, and also because red meant Caroline. After touching up my makeup, I added a simple pearl necklace and earrings. They were department-store pearls, not the sort you passed on to your daughters, but they looked real, and this was a day for appearances, not reality.
As soon as the kids left for school, I dropped Roman off at a day care. I stopped at a shipping store and bought a white cardboard tube to hold my plans, and then sat in the car for a half dozen deep breaths, wishing I could get my head between my knees in the cramped front seat. “Do or die, Cara.”
The car door stuck, but a solid shoulder whack knocked it open. I walked into the high-ceilinged bank lobby like I owned the place, my eyes straight ahead even when I sensed heads turning my way. If my skirt had a pocket, I would have patted it like it was filled with rolls of Benjamins. The loan officer at the floor desk shifted uncomfortably when he saw that I was headed for him. Before I said a word, he looked over his shoulder and waved me back to the head moneylender with the windowed office and heavy cherry door.
“Rothschild,” he said, shaking my hand without getting fully to his feet. “What can we do for you today?” His eyes drifted to his paperwork, so I placed my long cardboard tube on the desk, diagonally across whatever he had found slightly more interesting than me.
“I’m building a house, and I need you to help me cover some of the materials. The labor is taken care of and the land is free and clear. I’ll be the contractor.”
He tipped back in his chair, not exactly propping his feet on his desk but his posture saying that he would have if my cardboard tube weren’t in his way. “You can fill out an application and leave it with my assistant.” And there it was, that smirk they must teach in loan-officer school.
I handed him the completed application. Before he had time to scan much of it, I slid a thin stack of his papers over and dropped three neat folders with labeled tags protruding. “Three years of tax returns,” I said, then lifted the next folder, “and here’s an asset breakdown. The copy of my blueprint,” I tapped my fingertips on the tube, “is yours. I understand you’ll need it for the inspections.” I’d learned that at the last bank, the one that had turned me down before my seat was warm.
“And you’re a licensed contractor?” he asked, leaning forward in his chair, head down while he thumbed through my papers, eyes pausing on the dollar signs.
“I’ve pulled the permits. And while I’m not licensed, I have a lot of experience researching energy-efficient building models.” I added a folder of passive-solar designs to the stack, pretending that I had read as much of it as eleven-year-old Jada had.
But he was tilting back, stalled on the licensed-contractor nonsense. That quick, I’d lost him. The big fish was slipping right back into the pond.
So close. I had been so close.
“It’s vital that I have this by Wednesday—Thursday at the absolute latest. I’m ready to break ground immediately.” I raised my eyebrows, nodding my head. “You can do that for me, right? I was told you could—by Wednesday.”
Who was this damn cheeky girl? She was not me. She was not the Cara who listened in terror to the fi-fah of her husband’s breath while his thumbs pressed blue temporary tattoos on her skin. I had the irresistible urge to rub my neck, but redirected my hand to my clutch, a narrow leather bag that would have been more at home at a cocktail party. It had been that or my large bag filled with Cheerios remnants and tiny notebooks where I jotted down clever dialogue in the grocery line. I pulled out a tiny tin of mints, held it out. “Mr. Rothschild?”
He shook his head, leaning back over the papers and flipping through too fast to be doing anything more than a magician’s trick of distracting me while the number ticker in his head weighed the risk of taking me on.
I dropped a mint on my tongue even though I hadn’t wanted one and was afraid I would either choke on it or start drooling when the menthol hit my sinuses. He held up one of the papers and turned sideways to his computer. I smiled a bit, probably a mirror of the loan-officer smirk, when he slipped a pair of wire reading glasses on his nose before typing in a few numbers. He had barely been able to see my papers, let alone evaluate them with any real accounting math. He was as fake as my pearls.
“No accounts with us?” he asked, looking at the computer screen instead of me.
“This will be my first.”
He scrolled a few pages, probably reading them, or at least the important parts. I was fairly certain it was my credit score he was looking at, and thankfully it was in remarkably good shape. I’d never liked debt and paid everything off in record time. But more than one man in my past had gone on spending sprees that gave me plenty to pay off.
“And you’ll be able to do this immediately? By Wednesday?” I repeated, hoping he was distracted enough not to notice that my confidence, which had been unprecedentedly high to this point, was waning. My voice hadn’t squeaked, but it had been a touch too high, too plaintive. I pushed my shoulders back and dropped my chin, willing my voice to drop, too. “I’ll finish the foundation work before Christmas. Ice makes everything more complicated.”
He sat back, his chair spinning slowly back toward me, seemingly on its own. His eyes focused on the edge of his desk, which I could see had been nicked, probably by the arms of this chair. Little imperfections like that would irritate a perfectionist, an accountant. As the silence stretched between us, the wall clock above his desk seemed to grow louder. The second hand jerked unsteadily through the uphill side of each minute with two steps forward and one step back.
An image of him jumping up and throwing his computer monitor across the room made me wince. That was the last straw! I imagined him yelling, his glasses dropping to the floor and his hands coming for my throat. What were you thinking? You are too weak for this, Cara! But his hands were actually steepled at his chin, another thing they must teach in business school, the contemplative pose, similar to Rodin’s Thinker but with interlaced fingers to symbolize unity. We’re in this together.
“I think,” he said, slow and deliberate, bouncing his finger steeple off his chin. “I think we’re going to be ab
le to get this to you.”
“By Wednesday?” I asked, fully aware I was pushing my luck.
He stood, and stuck out his hand. Somehow I managed to prop myself on my own shaky legs to return his firm handshake while his closemouthed smile signaled that we were now partners but would never be friends. “By Thursday,” he said, letting me know that no matter how I’d entered the building, I did not own it after all. “Sit tight. I’ll get your paperwork.”
I walked out the front door, chin high, and with a construction loan for nearly a third more than I’d asked for. Sweat dripped between my shoulder blades and down the back of my knees in endless rivers.
“We did it! We have the money for everything we need and then some!” I shouted the minute the kids walked through the door. I had already told Roman, but the only part of celebrating he was interested in was the part that came with dessert.
The older kids were happy, but I detected a tiny bit of hesitation. We were celebrating our own enslavement. This project would chain us to a job site, and the work wasn’t going to be easy.
“It’s going to be a busy year!” Drew rubbed his hands together.
I shrugged, narrowing my eyes. “Actually, a busy nine months. Turns out a standard construction loan is not a full year.”
“Nine months, then,” Drew said, his eyebrows lifting under a couple of stray curls. The kids would be in school all day and I would have to keep my freelance jobs to pay the bills, which meant I’d be working full-time as a programmer and writing three to four hours a day. Nine months was possible … for an experienced crew. But for four kids and a woman who had struggled for more than an hour to get the light covers off the fluorescents in the garage last week, nine months was a heck of a stretch.
I closed my eyes and saw the tall glass of lemonade with the red and white paper straw, the last straw. It didn’t scare me like it used to.
I licked my lips and went to the pantry for a jug of lemonade. “It’s Cancún night!” I announced, the way I always did when we were having Mexican food. Once upon a time, Adam and I had spent a lot of time scuba diving, and Cancún had been a favorite spot.
“Everybody chops!” Hope said, waving her siblings toward cutting boards. Together, we made an enormous fajita dinner, talking and laughing with salsa music turned up loud. I couldn’t help wondering if it was a last-meal celebration. We wouldn’t have much time for hot meals in the next nine months. The three oldest did homework while I did cleanup, and then we herded into the car to drive the seven miles to our land, which was now officially our job site.
I’d brought four stakes—actually two old broom handles cut in half—a ball of neon-pink string, and a hundred-foot tape measure. The sun was setting but we could see well enough to pick the general location of the house on the upper section of our sloping acre. We pushed the stakes into the soggy earth with as much pride as Neil Armstrong claiming the moon. I had the distant thought that survey equipment was probably supposed to be brought in at this stage to align the front of the house with the road, some three hundred feet in front of it.
“Should we measure from the street back to this spot?” I asked, stomping next to the first stake.
“Just eyeball it,” Drew said, and we did.
The rectangle of our neon-pink string looped around the broom stakes looked far too small to hold all the rooms we’d painstakingly designed, far too small to hold a life. I’d read that that would be the case, that during early phases the house would look too small and other times it would feel far too big. We had measured rooms and furniture, so I knew it wasn’t as small as it looked. I stood in the muddy corner where my library would sprout and looked out an imaginary window. “It’s perfect,” I said.
“It’s home,” Hope added.
Then Roman threw up his fajitas and we loaded back in the car, all marveling over how fast his fever had come on and hoping he could make the seven miles back to the house without any more reappearing fajitas or surprises.
The rest of the fajitas stayed down, but the surprises did not.
The week before Christmas had visions of power tools dancing in our heads. I found a guy with a backhoe to dig the footer, a process we had only seen on YouTube videos but felt like we understood fairly well. We did our best to square up the broom handles by running lines diagonally across the rectangle in a giant X. Theoretically, according to a fiftyish guy in Utah who went by geo39th, if the lines of the X were the same length, and each of our parallel edges were equal lengths, the house would be perfectly square. Since this seemed like an important starting point, we hoped he was right.
I showed up thirty minutes early the morning Jimmy and his backhoe had agreed to be there, but he had still beat me by another thirty. I shouldn’t have stopped for Christmas baking supplies.
“Wanted to beat the traffic,” Jimmy said, or something like it. His Southern accent was so dramatically skewed by the thick plug of tobacco under his gray lip that I had spent the first five minutes of our phone conversation trying to translate his words from Spanish before I realized he was speaking some form of English. I nodded. Any miscommunication could be blamed on tractor noise. He stared at me, a loan-officer smirk on his face. Nothing wrong with being early, but it surprised me that he hadn’t started digging. His tractor was burning fuel by the bathtub.
“Chalk?” he asked.
I shrugged, as lost as if he’d asked what I thought about dem Yanks or whatever sport was in season.
“Gotta mark it.”
“Yes.” I nudged a broomstick with my toe. How could he possibly miss my neon-pink string?
He raised his eyebrows, eyes shining with a gleam of amusement I was going to have to get used to seeing. “Bucket’ll tangle in yo pretty string.”
I’d bought the string at the lumberyard. They’d had orange and pink. I’d picked pink not because I was a girl, but because it looked especially visible and didn’t look like hunting gear. Okay, and maybe partly because I was a girl. At any rate, it was construction string and I thought we had used it the right way. This was how geo39th marked his Utah foundation. I’d watched him run his strings more than a dozen times. But I looked at the gaping teeth on the backhoe’s orange bucket and could see he was right. We had missed a step—apparently an important one. “Chalk?”
“Or top-side-down sprayin’ paint.”
“Chalk?” I asked again, imagining an extralarge chunk of Roman’s sidewalk chalk and trying for a visual of how that could possibly help me mark a footing.
“Comes in a bag.” He wiped thick, tanned fingers down his face and checked his watch.
“Bag of chalk. Hold on!” I ran to my car, sinking ankle-deep in a mud pocket along the way and carefully ignoring the cold goo seeping through my sock. Contractors don’t shake off the mud; they wear it like a badge. I opened my trunk and grabbed a five-pound bag of flour. It had turned out to be a good thing that Roman expected a dozen batches of cookies over the school break.
I straddled the line with my right foot in my future library and my left in the front yard, ripped the corner off the bag of flour, and walked backward, bent at the waist and leaving a powdery white line to outline the house. I had been moving fast, conscious that the clock was running on the backhoe, and didn’t look up at Jimmy until I reached my starting point. He gave a little salute while I pulled the string out of the way, dragging it across the yard with two of the stakes flopping along behind like fish on a stringer. I saluted back, feeling like one of the guys.
Jimmy carved perfect trenches into the earth, and the idea of our house merging deep past the surface sent a thrill through me. Digging deep was never easy, but it was always worthwhile. I wound my pink string into a ball. Everything would have to be used and reused for us to come in under budget. I leaned the stakes against a tree and carried the empty flour sack to the car. “‘Self-rising,’” I read from the label. “Don’t I wish.”
If wishes were fishes, we’d all cast nets, my grandma used to say. And wasn�
�t that the truth? I wasn’t much of a wisher anymore, though; I wasn’t watching the stars or pulling off flower petals while waiting for good things to find me. I was building them.
Jimmy pulled an old stump and an enormous root system out of the general area of our future refrigerator and loaded it on his trailer next to his backhoe. We exchanged a fair amount of dirt and flour with a vigorous handshake, and I wrote him a smudged check with only his first name because I hadn’t quite understood his last name despite the three occasions I’d asked him to repeat it.
“Know how to set da rebar?” he asked, truck door open and one foot on the bent, mud-encrusted running board.
I angled my head toward the oak where I’d propped the stakes and pink string. A fat bag of black rebar chairs rested against the oak like a lumpy pillow.
“Shit.” Jimmy spit a nauseating brown stream. “Better off usin’ rocks in dat clay mess. Got a mini spring yonder.” He pointed at the far corner of my den. “Wear yo hip waders.” He laughed and I joined him. Might as well. Once I sorted out what all that meant, it would probably be funny.
“Thanks, Jimmy. I’ll be calling you for the Donna Fill before long.”
He nodded and pulled away, no doubt with a fine story to tell at the next job site.
I had barely squeaked through the ground breaking even with a professional on site to fix my mistakes. Now that I was all alone, the gaping foundation holes were as daunting as pathways to the underworld. Even repetitive viewings of geo39th’s wise overview of footings hadn’t managed to make me look like an expert. If I went back and watched the video, I was willing to bet I’d see a line of chalk or paint when the backhoe ate a hole in the earth. He had probably imagined that any imbecile would know enough to take that step. It went without saying. You couldn’t leave the strings and stakes up for the dig. That would be just plain stupid. And even though geo39th had sworn by the rebar chairs, he wasn’t working in red clay. And what was this about a mini spring? I walked around the trench, my courage as unstable as the wet earth.
Rise--How a House Built a Family Page 7
