Hope raised her eyebrows, suggesting that the house wasn’t the only thing off balance.
“It’s too late to just change the plans,” Drew argued. “We’ve already framed this. The plywood is up. You can’t just start cutting holes in it!” He had moved from being scared that I was psychotic to angry that I had ruined a perfectly good wall.
I grinned. “Actually, I can! I can just come out here and cut a hole in the wall and put a window in it. If that’s what I want, then that’s exactly what I can do!” I started laughing then, hysterical laughter. I felt powerful again. In fact, I felt more powerful than I ever had in my life, and I was ready to start cutting again. I picked up the drill and made a one-inch hole in the corner so I could turn the blade.
“Go out front. Look at the house. This window has to be here. I’m serious. Go look.” I waved them away, as anxious to get back to my cutting as I was to prove myself right. They went reluctantly, Roman on their tail with his little hands propped on his hips, mimicking their disapproval. Before they rounded the corner I had the saw moving again, making a mostly-straight line up the wall, and then I climbed on the ladder to make the final cut across the top.
The wood fell out with a lot less grace than the pieces had with the chain saw. This one was a lot heavier with the six-inch studs still attached. I grinned and waved to the kids, sticking my head out. “See what I mean! This is exactly what it needed.”
Jada waved back, nodding and smiling. Roman did, too, because what could possibly be more fun than cutting a peek-a-boo hole in the side of a house?
Hope and Drew finally agreed that I was right: The house simply wouldn’t have worked without the extra window. Drew returned, still red-faced. “We’ll have to build a header for that. And cripples.”
I stood back for a better look at what I’d done. “Yeah, I could have planned that cut a little better. We’ll have to cut the two-by-sixes up higher for the header. It’s actually going to be hard to do with the plywood on, isn’t it.”
He nodded. “But it will look a lot better. I’ll start on the headers.”
We were nearing the end of April without a roof, and the bank loan would close in less than five months. It was going to be impossibly tight to the finish. We couldn’t do the insulation, cabinets, or flooring until the electric and HVAC were in. And of course we couldn’t have the electric or HVAC put in without a roof. Everywhere we turned was a catch-22.
But we did have another window, and there is nothing quite like picking up a saw and cutting your own window straight through the wall to give you a new perspective on life.
The bricklayers showed up later that week. We had done the block ourselves and I knew it was solid, but I also knew it wasn’t as aesthetically pleasing as I’d like the finished brick to be. So I hired a crew to put brick up several feet in the back and sides of the house and on the entire front. They would also build brick steps onto the front porch and columns around the porch posts.
We all marveled at how fast they worked, tossing armloads of bricks up to a worker on the scaffolding who caught them with a scoop of his tan arms, piled them up, and reached down for the next armload flying his way.
While they worked on the front, Dad started us on the siding behind the house and then he built a chimney around the triple-wall pipe for my woodstove. The siding made Jada and Drew happy. It was fast progress with a beautiful finished product. Everything we had done until that point was part of the interior skeleton of the house. The brick and siding were finish work. We pretended it meant we were almost done.
By the time we got most of the siding finished and all the brick was up, Dad had almost reached the end of his medicine supply. Because of the complex delivery schedule of the refrigerated interferon he needed for his MS, he had planned to leave when it ran out rather than change the shipping address.
I felt a little panicked at the thought of making decisions on my own again. Even if I would probably come to the same conclusions, I found a lot of comfort in tossing around the possibilities and hearing someone else say my thinking was sound, even another amateur. Dad no doubt felt my panic and doubled up his workload, staying at the job site all day while I was at work and the kids were at school and then continuing with us past sunset.
I shouldn’t have been surprised when, only two days before he planned to leave, Jada ran into the house to get me. “Grampa fell. He’s hurt.” Her eyes had teared over and her fingertips pressed so hard on her bottom lip that it faded to a bloodless white.
He had been on the damn ladder again, putting the last of the siding on the chimney out back. I never got a clear answer about how far he fell or what he hit. He had made it to a lawn chair that was tilted crooked on a lump of concrete and he was holding his arm, already swollen and ugly enough that I wanted to take him directly to the emergency room.
“Now just wait awhile,” he said. “I felt around. Nothing’s broken.”
He was trembling and his voice was quiet and high-pitched.
“We have to get your arm X-rayed. It could have a fracture, you can’t feel that by poking around.”
“Oh, my arm?” He laughed a little, but it was eerie instead of funny. “My arm is nothing. It’s my back I hurt.”
When he had caught his breath I checked out his back and found a knob the size of half a tennis ball next to his spine. I had never seen anything like it and couldn’t even imagine what it was. But I knew what it cost. And the price was too high for a house.
The kids and I pleaded and insisted. I even threatened to call an ambulance, which only prompted him to prove he could walk to the car on his own two feet. Maybe I forgot to mention it, but my dad is stubborn. Glad I didn’t inherit that annoying trait.
He took three extra-strength Tylenol and went to bed as soon as we got home. Then he rested another day and we packed him up for the drive home. He still insisted that he wanted to see his own doctor, because that would be easier for insurance. I still insisted that he needed an X-ray and probably an MRI of both his arm and his back. The sixteen-hour drive north was never pleasant, but this time it would be a special slice of hell.
I told him I loved him, thanked him for all the hard work, and then cried like a baby when he drove away with turkey sandwiches and sliced cheddar packed in a cooler next to him.
He called when he made it home and never told me what all the doctor said about the fall. I was glad that he went, at least, and trusted him to follow through while I picked up the pace on the build. Even with the boost of his help we were still impossibly behind schedule.
The kids and I spent a couple more long days cleaning up around the site. Brick and siding pieces had become a tripping hazard, and I wasn’t going to stand for any more injuries.
We hauled everything to the dump after dark and ate a quiet supper that did not include either turkey or cheese. We’d had enough of both to take a very long break.
I felt tired all the way through. My back was protesting from another day of bending and lifting after it had finally mended from the last strain. I took a Tylenol and climbed into bed. I didn’t go looking for Benjamin, and per usual, he respected my wishes. Sometimes I wanted his peace, no matter the cost, and other times it felt too fake to wrap around my shoulders, like a fairy-tale land that only I had access to. It didn’t feel fair. I wanted peace in the real world, the world I shared with my kids. They deserved to travel forward without the weight we carried. And if they couldn’t have it with me, then I didn’t want it at all.
Benjamin was stubborn, but in a different way from me or Dad. He didn’t argue with me. He had more effective ways to pull me in, and he was patient.
We stayed off the job site for a couple of days so I could catch up on work, or that’s what I told myself. The truth was that I was physically and emotionally exhausted. And maybe I was once again afraid to move forward.
On Wednesday night, we all went to Inkwell to mark the electrical. I had no idea how our pot-smoking electricians could possibly wire
the place without electrocuting themselves, but I had already paid them the required 50 percent deposit, and that was over five grand. Like too many things in my life, there was no turning back, no way out.
We walked through the house together to make sure we didn’t miss anything. Each of the big kids was armed with a different color of spray paint. Drew had yellow to mark ceiling light fixtures. Hope had red to mark double light switches for fan-and-light combos and green for single-light fixtures. Combos of more switches received a red-green “X.” Jada had white for outlets. It was her first time using spray paint, and she was wearing the giddy smile of a graffiti artist in front of a clean train. Each of them was also armed with a scrap of cardboard to prevent paint from dripping onto the floor. Or at least that was the plan. I followed with a clipboard, checking off which lights I’d already purchased and which were still needed.
Room by room, we arranged imaginary furniture and lamps, making sure every room was perfectly labeled. When we were standing in the den, which was the last room to mark, I stood in the exterior doorway, supervising the marking.
“There’s the hardworking lady,” a deep voice said from directly behind me.
I jumped and the clipboard went clattering across the floor, with me running after it and spinning to identify the voice at the same time. My legs tangled and I went down on my butt, heart racing and ears thudding.
Past the doorway stood a trio of young Hispanic men, visible only from the middle up because the floor was four feet off the ground and we hadn’t built steps yet. They stood in a triangle, each carrying a fishing pole. The point man’s tongue fluttered through apologies while the two taller boys flanking him stared with true concern and not the slightest hint of humor—which was a lot more than I could say for my own giggling offspring.
I held my palms up and attempted a smile. “I’m fine. Just fine. You surprised me, that’s all. I didn’t know anyone was out there.”
“Yeah, we are going fishing,” the point man said, ducking his head. “The neighbor there says we can.” He nodded across the pond.
We had seen them fishing and had never thought it was a big deal. And since we had also seen them a quarter of a mile down the road having barbecues and listening to music, we assumed that they walked by our house to get to the pond. But I had never considered that they walked through our backyard. It was hard to remember that this had all been a field a few months ago, and using a well-worn fishing path would be a hard habit to break. It was fine with me if they kept using it while we worked, but I was jumpier than the average girl.
“We sit over there and watch you working every day and we say, ‘That is one hardworking white woman,’ and it’s true. You are building a big house, right?” He ducked his head again.
I laughed, maybe harder than I should have, but I couldn’t help it. Not only had they scared me half out of my mind, they had just made the most beautiful reverse-stereotype statement in history.
“Do you work in construction?” I tried to keep the eagerness out of my voice, but on the inside I was on my knees with my hands folded in prayer. I could certainly use skilled additions to my work crew.
The tall boy of maybe sixteen behind the spokesman, who looked about fourteen, answered this time. “Oh, no. We don’t know nothing about making things like this. We are at the Chico’s Restaurante on Highway 7. Juan is a cook. Maybe you’ll come by sometime?” he asked.
“I love the cheese dip there!” Hope said.
I nodded, even though I had never had their cheese dip or anything else. “Good luck with the fish today.” I pointed at their fishing poles.
“Maybe you’ll join us?” They waved and walked away.
Drew pulled me to my feet as though the bizarre encounter hadn’t happened. And since I was the one humiliated on my butt, and embarrassed to have three strange teenagers tell me that I was a hardworking white woman, I was equally willing to let the whole thing go. “What’s next on the list?” he asked.
Hope marked the last outlet in the den, using a lot more paint than she needed. We were all feeling a little restless.
“We’re getting more and more stuck without the roof.” I held my hand up when I saw the look in his eye. “No. We are not going to try to build it ourselves.” I chewed my bottom lip, afraid of what was about to come out of my mouth. “Why don’t we start the plumbing?”
“How?” Drew asked.
I had no idea. I turned to a fresh page on my clipboard and walked to the garage, where the main water line came in under the foundation and up through the slab. “It’ll be easy. We just trace a path from where the water comes in and pass it over each place we want water. We do this all the way up to the attic where the water heater will be, and then back down with the hot water. I’ll mark down how many of each turn we need. Make sense?” I didn’t look up to see if it did.
In a column down the left side of my paper I drew pictures of connectors (I would later learn they were called joints) that looked like “T”s and plus signs. Under those, I wrote “faucet,” “sprayer,” “toilet,” and each of the appliances that needed water. I held it up to the kids. “See? We just make hash marks by each item for a count, and then I’ll take this to the plumbing-supply store tomorrow. I found one in Little Rock that will give me a contractor’s discount if I show that I pulled the permit.” I had no idea if my method was close to a proper plan, but we had watched some plumbing videos and decided to use plastic PEX pipe, so I had at least a vague idea of the process and what the pieces looked like.
We made the hash-mark counts, and even though it was earlier than we would quit on an average work day, there was little else we could do. Everyone was quiet on the ride home, feeling restless under our time crunch. Waiting for other people to do work was the worst part of building the house. When it was our fault that things didn’t get done, we were a lot more forgiving.
I didn’t stop at the mailbox when we pulled in front of our other house, the one we lived in but didn’t feel at home in, and I drove a little too fast up the driveway and into the garage.
“I need a vacation. Someplace with too much sun and sand,” I said, half under my breath. And too much tequila, I wanted to add. I had never been much of a drinker, but it sounded like a great idea just then. It had been more than a year since I’d had time to go out and have a margarita and a plate of fajitas. I couldn’t remember the last movie I’d watched in a theater. One of the early Harry Potter films, four, maybe five years ago?
“I have sand,” Roman said. “You use the orange shovel.”
I smiled at him in my rearview mirror while the other kids climbed out of the car. They hadn’t gone to movies either, or on dates, or to sleepovers. Our lives were on hold while we worked insanely long and difficult hours. We were giving up so much with the hope of a small step forward. How did life come so easily to so many other people? Other women had husbands who helped, or at least paid child support and felt an obligation to provide for their kids. Other women had friends and big families and safety nets.
My parents were amazing and supportive, but neither of them lived close enough to be part of my everyday life, and besides, they had their own ghosts to overcome and futures to dream about. My mom was trying to find a way to retire early so she could travel and see her family in Wisconsin more often. She had gone through extreme hardship in her life, and no matter how hard she worked, she hit roadblocks and challenges. I wanted more than anything for her to have a break. She had accomplished so much, but was always working for everyone else. It was time for her.
The kids settled into pajamas and disappeared into their rooms. I called my mom and sat out on the back porch to let her tell me that things were going to be just fine. In fact, they were going to be superb. “You have to make mini vacations out of everyday life,” she said. “Remember how poor we were when you were a teenager? There were several years we almost starved to death. If it weren’t for the free lunches at school, I don’t think we would have made it thro
ugh. But we found ways to have fun.”
They had been horrible times. I was too malnourished to stay awake in class. Boys in my high school showed me pictures of anorexic women and jeered, “Look familiar, Cara?,” laughing and socking one another in the arm. They might not have laughed if they saw me slipping ketchup packages into my purse to eat for my supper. Even when Mom made a big pot of soup from discount-bin pasta and dented-can vegetables, I would try not to eat much so there would be enough for her. She didn’t have the free lunch I got every day. She didn’t even get ketchup packages.
I played a game on weekends and during the summer that I had never told her about. I called it my two-o’clock game. If I could hold out on eating my one meal for the day until two, then I could still get to sleep at night. It was an exercise in extreme self-control, because I woke up weak with a sharp enough pain in my belly that I sometimes wondered if it would just eat a hole right through me. The easiest times were when I had a book to hide in. I didn’t own any books, but we went to the library regularly and I pretended the stories were as good as food until two o’clock came.
“The kids and I have it a lot better than we did then,” I said, eyes tearing. Who was I to complain? I had let myself forget how far we had both come. “We have more than enough to eat. And we have heat. Remember how cold we got? The toilet would freeze. And poor little Snoopy couldn’t ever keep a bowl of water because it froze right there on the kitchen floor!”
Mom laughed. “We slept in a half dozen layers, and you tied a hood around your head at night. Remember that? Just your nose and mouth peeking out. But we still made vacations. We had little Friday-night celebrations watching the PBS fund-drive movies on that old television with lines all through it.”
“Doctor Who!” we said at the same time.
“We went and picked up pecans together,” Mom reminded me.
Rise--How a House Built a Family Page 21
