It took us just over a week to fill in the basement-like space inside our block walls, so we were walking near the top block, where our slab would be poured. In the back corner of the house we were about eighteen inches off the ground, but in the front we were more like eight feet up. We weren’t ready for the slab yet, though; first we had to pack the Donna Fill tight and run the sewer lines.
I rented a walk-behind Wacker packer and let it drag me around the surface. The device looked a little like an oversize push lawn mower, but weighed two hundred pounds and had a smooth plate across the entire vibrating bottom to pack the Donna Fill down tight.
The kids hauled loads of Donna Fill in after me to fill any voids created by the compression. We pulled strings tight across the surface to find uneven places that needed a shovelful added or taken away. More packing, more shifting powdery granite from one spot to another, and then even more packing until it looked as smooth as the roller rinks of my childhood. Couples’ skate, everyone!
We finally finished the trench from the street to bury the water line up to the house and glued a vertical line of pipe together with a spigot on the end. The idea of having fresh drinking water on site made us all ecstatic, so it was with much fanfare that I attached a hose and turned it on. Then with less fanfare I ran to the street and turned the valve I had forgotten to open that would allow water up the pipe. When I gave it a second try, pointing the nozzle at a tree and whispering a mixture of curses and prayers, Roman clapped with delight. “Momma’s peeing on the tree!” he shouted. Then he froze, eyes wide, hands tugging at his waistband, and feet hopping in the familiar I-gotta-go-now dance.
Drew shut the hose down while Roman took my place by the tree.
Pete hadn’t been around in a while, but I called him for help with the sewer lines. I was terrified to place them myself. If I measured wrong, our toilet would sit outside the bathroom, and the washing machine could end up in the hallway. Not only that, but the wrong angle on a pipe could funnel sewage in the wrong direction, namely, back into my house.
“Sewer lines’re easy,” Pete told me over the phone. “Only one rule to remember, shit flows downhill. You get that right, everything will work out.”
We muddled through with a little help from him and a lot of help from YouTube. He said he would stop by the day before my plumbing inspection to check things out.
Since I had to take half the day off work anyhow for the inspection, I scheduled a photography session that morning to get some new shots for my book promotions. I was up early getting my curls under control and trying to remember how to apply makeup. My mind was so clearly somewhere else that the photographer mentioned a faraway look in my eye like it was a bad thing. He was a trouper, but the final selection was filled with forced smiles and worry creases on the way to a migraine. I selected several almost at random, ran out of the studio and then back in twice before I had my purse, my phone, and the photo CD.
To my surprise, I actually found Pete at the job site, checking plumbing lines and adjusting a couple of the caps. Every open end, like where the toilets, sinks, and washing machine would eventually hook in, had to be temporarily capped. Then we filled the lines with water through the open end of one pipe elevated about two feet above the rest, where the city inspector would observe.
The surface of the Donna Fill had large white PVC lines running flat along the surface with the capped-off pipes sticking up like too many straws in a milk shake. The inspector’s water level had to hold steady to prove I didn’t have any leaks. He hung around and gave me building tips in between dropping subtle hints that I was insane for trying to build the house with my kids. I was a nervous wreck. If he found a leak, I had no idea how to repair it aside from cutting out faulty joints and then splicing new pipe in with an even higher risk of leaks because every repair would add at least two extra glued joints.
We passed on the first test and I caught myself reaching out to hug him.
The inspector checked our electric box and found we had electricity. I had no idea how long it had been hooked up, since I hadn’t seen the electricians after the Funyuns day. The box passed inspection and we would now be able to power tools from our own meter.
We were left slightly shell-shocked by the amount of effort involved in the foundation. In fact, it was a part of the build that hadn’t even crossed our minds back when we were building a stick house and drawing the plan. We’d had to dig deep, literally and figuratively, just to get everything to a solid ground level that felt like the start of a real house. From this point on, we would be spending a lot less time on our hands and knees in the mud and a lot more time reaching over our heads.
That self-rising flour had worked after all. Inkwell Manor was rising from the earth like a live creature with important things on her mind. Before we went home that night, we each dipped our hands in red clay and made a print on the block at the front of the house. The primitive cave-art on our massive concrete structure made me smile.
“We made this,” Hope said.
“With our own hands,” Drew added with a half smile that was all the way real.
We went home aching less than we had in months, maybe years. The bones, muscles, and joints still ached, but we were all beginning to realize how unimportant those aches were in the construction of a person.
That week I hired two unknown finishers to manage the slab pour. I needed it to be professionally smoothed, since I planned to stain it as finished concrete flooring. It didn’t cost much more to pay them than it would to rent the concrete tools, so it was worth the cash. Despite a few tense moments when the trucks arrived too close together and dumped yards of concrete faster than we could manage, everything turned out close enough to perfect for me. Our house and our shop had a solid foundation, and it was starting to look like my relationship with the kids did, too.
Projects at the office were overwhelming enough to send me home with brain bleed every day for the next week. Programming was a great job to pay the bills and satisfied my inner geek, but office drama and deadlines were harder to handle on three hours of sleep a night.
Whether it was healthy or not, I started using a hammer to deal with stress. Thankfully, I had plenty of things to pound on without looking completely out of my mind. The kids had fallen in right behind me with the work-till-you-drop method of healing. Since most of the time they appeared to be feeling better about themselves instead of worse, I deemed it a success.
On a warm day in late January, after we ate some of the best blueberry skillet cakes on the planet, we dressed in our construction clothes. Hope packed a cooler into the trunk while Drew piled in tools. Hershey crowded in the back at the kids’ feet, her head on Jada’s lap, eyes darting from her to Roman.
It felt different driving up and seeing a smooth, hard slab. None of us had walked on it yet, and for a few minutes we stood and marveled over the solidity, half wondering if it was a mirage that we’d sink right through.
Finally, we stepped forward together, all smiles. It had been no small feat to make it this far. Standing eight feet off the ground to overlook our kingdom, I felt like we’d summited Everest. An inordinate amount of fist pumping, squealing, and cartwheeling took place. And just like an Everest climber, I became newly aware of the hazards of a descent. We were up out of the mud, but we had farther to fall. Roman could tumble right off the edge. We needed walls fast. We set out to put them up, certain of one thing only: Nothing is as easy as it appears on YouTube.
“Stay back, Roman. Stay away from the edge, okay sweetie?” I dashed toward him.
Drew snatched him by the arm, and then to take the sting out of it, propped him up on his shoulders. “Whoa! Look how tall you are!” he said.
“I a great, big, little, giant!” He lifted his arms high and roared.
“We need to build a safety fence around this slab,” Drew said, peering down over the eight-foot corner where Roman had teetered seconds ago. Broken blocks and shards of hardened mortar littered the ground.<
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“No time for temporary safety nets. Let’s build some walls. Until then, we’ll keep taking shifts watching Roman. Jada has the first shift today.” I spread a copy of our pencil-drawn plans on the floor of our future laundry room. Drew and Hope knelt next to me while Jada and Roman ran off the slab to hunt for tadpoles in the puddles.
“Where do we start?” Hope asked.
I wiped a hand over my face. I had no idea where to start. “The library,” I answered, as though it were the gospel truth. “The south wall is a wet wall, so we know exactly where to put it.” That was true at least. The big white pipes to carry wastewater down from the upstairs had to be sandwiched inside a wall. We walked back to that side of the house. Drew and Hope were wearing their tool belts, and I strapped mine on while we all stared down at the sewer line poking up through the slab.
“I’ve got the tape measure.” Drew shook the hundred-foot reel tape at me.
“Who has the chalk line?” I asked.
“Jada!” Hope yelled. “We need the chalk line!”
Jada looked down at her feet and ran through the mud field to the back corner of the property, Roman trailing after her with an empty pail and muddy net. Her tongue stuck out a little while she worked the knot tying the chalk line around a fat hickory tree. Even though I was sixty feet from it, I could see neon-orange rings around the tree from the ground up to her shoulder height where she had tied it. I hoped it hadn’t been hanging there as her limbo line through any rainstorms.
“Fourteen feet is what we planned.” I waved Drew to the corner. “Measure out and see how close we are with the pipe.” I made pencil marks at three points and was pleased that we were almost exactly on the mark with our plans. But we hadn’t really understood how large the pipes would be when we drew the plans, so we would be two inches off on the other side. The wet wall had to be constructed with two-by-sixes instead of two-by-fours, to allow room for the four-inch sewer line coming down from the toilet.
“No more playing with the tools, Jada. They aren’t toys!” Hope snatched the chalk line and picked stray bits of dirt and bark away before winding it up.
“Ask me before you play with a tool. And even if I give you permission, they have to be back in the shop before we leave the site.”
Jada nodded, still looking at her feet.
“You can use my tools.” Roman offered his mud-crusted net with a grin.
“If you and Roman gather sticks and sweetgum balls, I’ll make a fire later,” I said, knowing it would be just the thing to cheer her up.
They ran off, swerving for maximum puddle exposure. Less than an hour on site and their jeans were already splattered with red mud from ankle to butt.
Hope wound the chalk line in and shook the case to recoat the string with fresh chalk powder. We stretched the line and popped marks for the library walls, carefully leaving spaces for the French doors. Then we went back to the laundry room and marked it out. That pipe was off by about three inches. Still not the end of the world as far as amateur builds went.
I felt powerful, moving whole walls this way and that like giant chess pieces. The kids were getting into it, too, really feeling the house as a three-dimensional space for the first time. By the time Jada and Roman asked for lunch, all the downstairs walls were marked. It had taken longer than I expected, but I was a firm believer in measuring ten times and building once—or twice.
Drew built a fire in the rock ring and we sat around it with our sandwiches, each staring into the blaze and chewing in the same slow rhythm of the licking flames. I looked down and found my plate empty except for a piece of crust. I clicked my tongue and tossed it to Hershey. She caught it and turned her eyes on Jada, the most likely source of dropped food.
Roman was sagging in his mini lawn chair, sandwich gone and eyes closed.
I carried him to his pallet in the shop. Hershey looked forlorn to leave the food, but she followed and settled next to Roman to keep guard. I sat on a can of concrete sealer and closed my eyes. I just needed one second. The bucket tipped a little and a realized I had dozed off and almost fallen over.
Drew stood in the doorway. “Can we build a wall?” he asked.
I knew how he felt; I was anxious, too. “We have to mark the windows and exterior doors. Then we can try a wall.”
“Sounds easy,” he said, as though we hadn’t already learned that none of this was as easy as it looked on paper.
We marked windows first, measuring a half dozen times, and then starting again. The interior wall placement had some leeway, but windows would be seen from the outside by other people. They had to be perfect. And since I hadn’t even ordered them yet, I wasn’t exactly sure what size the rough frame should be. We worked our way around the house and then added the doors and window to the garage, except the overhead garage doors, which would take a few more phone calls to figure out.
The number of decisions I had to make on the spot that day frightened me. There were no other adults to ask, Does that sound right? What do you think? It was all on me, and I was starting to feel the weight of it. It didn’t take a genius or a licensed contractor to know that the decision overload would snowball over the next few months.
Because Drew needed it, we framed out one long, windowless, doorless library wall before we called it a day. The top and bottom pieces for the wall were sixteen feet long, just like they had been in the shop, but they were six inches wide instead of four in order to better insulate the house. I marked every sixteen inches on the top and bottom plates while Hope lined up the eight-foot-tall boards between them and Drew locked them in place with the nail gun. We couldn’t push it upright, because we weren’t sure how to brace a solitary wall that was eight feet off the ground at the base, but even flat on the ground it felt like progress.
Daylight was fading and Roman had gone cranky. “Let’s head home. We’ll look at the walls again tomorrow. Maybe get a couple set in place.” I wanted to build the walls as much as Drew did, but my understanding of framing the corners, doors, and windows was shaky. There were precious few purely straight walls in the open floor plan.
“Doesn’t look like we did a thing,” Drew said as we pulled down the driveway.
“Some days the work is invisible, but taking time to set it all up will make the next few days a thousand times more productive.”
Roman named things out the window all the way home. “Horse! Red truck-truck-truck. That pond. Kid. See that kid? Motorcycle. Horse. That a school. School.”
No one else spoke. Building was hard work, both inside and out. Without realizing it, we had learned to be very comfortable flat on our faces in the mud, where a fall wouldn’t hurt as bad. Now that we were stretching upward, redefining ourselves, a backward tumble would really hurt. And when you’ve had a lifetime of people sticking their legs out on the school bus to trip you, it’s hard to really believe this time will be different. This time you won’t fall flat. This time you’ll build higher and higher until you’ve built yourself a safe place.
While the kids showered, I made a chicken stir-fry with extra water chestnuts because Jada and Roman giggled over the way they crunched. It was the sort of night extra giggles might be needed. We’d all become pros at looking forward instead of back, but exhaustion slowed our forward momentum enough for the past to nip at our heels.
I pushed the stir-fry to rest on the back burner and ran to take a shower while the rice finished. Over the past seventeen years I’d become master of the speed-shower.
The kids were wet-headed and soapy-fresh when I came out. Hope directed Jada and Drew to set the table and move the food there while she made cherry Kool-Aid.
“Juice?” I asked.
She shook her head.
“Milk?” But I waved a hand as soon as I asked. We’d used the last of that for breakfast. The to-do list was long enough that things were falling off the tattered ends.
“Don’t pour any Kool-Aid for me. I’ll have water.” I knew we’d run out of sugar next.
Jada and Roman were kneeling and standing on chairs at the dining-room table, peering into the stir-fry, when I carried drinks in.
“Oooo I see dem crunchies!” Roman said, clapping. The doorbell rang and he jumped, face stretched back like he was saying Eeeeeeee. He leapt from the chair toward me and I barely managed to catch him under one arm. He swung out and back again before I secured the other arm and pulled him close. I kissed his forehead, and he dropped his head to my shoulder, holding tight.
We were brushing at the edges of feeling safe and secure, but we weren’t there yet. A neighbor boy selling discount shopping cards for his baseball team still set us all on edge, wide-eyed and pale. At least for now, only our hearts were running at marathon speed. Our feet were firm and unbudging. We were planting roots.
–12–
Fall
The Art of War
Hope was in middle school, Drew in elementary, and Jada in preschool when I put our home, the home we had shared with Adam, up for sale. I’d had a final divorce decree for several years by then and a restraining order for just as many, but Adam had never recognized either piece of paper. It was starting to look like nothing would keep him away.
“Some lady was looking at the house about an hour ago,” eleven-year-old Drew said when I pushed through the front door after a too-long day of writing computer code.
“You didn’t let her inside though, right?” I asked, scalp tingling, heart galloping.
“She knocked, but I ignored it. She was out by the sign mostly. Looked like she was doing something to it.”
“Maybe it was the realtor?”
He laughed. “No. It was definitely not the realtor. She was wearing this big yellow beach hat, and maybe a bathing-suit top. Really weird. It’s not even hot out. And it’s cloudy.”
I had a long commute in those days. Even though Hope was only twelve, she was in charge of Drew and seven-year-old Jada for almost two hours before I came home. Roman wasn’t around yet. Most days my mom arranged her work schedule to be there when I wasn’t, but she wasn’t there that day. “It’s good you didn’t answer the door. You guys have to stay inside until I get home. Don’t forget.”
Rise--How a House Built a Family Page 14
