I TOOK THE PAINT buckets and decided what discarded paint colors would look best and where. Salinger helped me paint the entire inside of the house and cabinets and it transformed it. I cleaned windows, pulled all the weeds, planted seeds, used old river rock to border the beds, and mowed the lawns myself with Alta Mae’s old hand mower. I looked online for alternative fence options and decided to do a horizontal plank fence because it required less wood, would cost less, and still looked good.
Over the next few days, Salinger took me to my voluntary drug test at Legal Aid. We picked out marked boards at the hardware store, boards they couldn’t sell at their full amount due to small imperfections, and dramatically reduced in price. Over the following two weeks, the store workers helped us gather enough of that cheap wood to tear down the front and back porches and rebuild. Noah and Ansen helped us with that. I power washed the old siding of the house, removing all the old paint, then painted the entire house a pretty blue with cream trim. That cost me an entire week’s paycheck, but it was worth it to see it all come together so well.
We played chess every single day together and I started to feel a little more human again. I missed my mom ferociously, but I was learning to compartmentalize. I had a set order of things I wanted to accomplish—finish the house, get visitation, get the girls, mourn our mom, deal with Trace.
Faye the social worker came to inspect our progress and even she wasn’t able to deny the improvements we’d made. She recognized my clean drug tests as well and promised to evaluate visitation rights.
That morning, after we’d worked, Salinger and I were feeling so good about ourselves, he treated me to take-out.
“Enough ramen already, Lily,” he’d said and I didn’t disagree.
We sat in my living room, enjoying how different it all looked and felt.
“Only a few things left now,” he said.
“Yeah,” I sighed, feeling calmer than I had in a long time. “The floors, right? Maybe some new beds for the girls, and that’s it.”
“Yeah,” he agreed, flipping through the television stations.
“Thank you for all your help, Salinger.”
“Of course,” he said, and flipped up his laptop. “Just checking to see what grade I got on this pysch paper.” He leaned into the screen. “Nothing yet.”
I smiled at him. “You’re pretty amazing,” I told him.
“Not at all,” he said.
“Are you kidding? You work five days a week, go to school, and you’re helping me with all of this stuff. You’re just… You’re amazing.”
It started raining and I shrieked then jumped up.
“What’s going on?” he asked.
“Well, uh, we’ve got a few leaks. I’m grabbing the rain buckets from the hall closet!” I called out, running to the hall.
“How bad are the leaks?” he asked.
“Pretty bad,” I said, shoving a few buckets in his arms.
“How bad?” he asked.
He followed me all over the house, helping me place them where the leaks were the worst. We glanced between the rooms, checking for new leaks.
“Uh, this is insane,” he said, glancing all around the living room, where we’d ended up.
I blushed red. “Yeah, a little.”
“We need to replace the roof.”
“Okay,” I said, running my hands through my hair. “What is that going to cost?”
Salinger looked a little sick. “I can’t do a roof, Lily. Too much. You’d have to hire someone, and that can be thousands of dollars.”
I nodded. “I’ll save then.”
“That would take you months,” he whispered.
“I don’t have that much—” I began, but I was interrupted when we heard someone knocking on the front door.
I scaled the buckets and opened it, but there was no one there. Attached to the new screen on the screen door, though, was a taped note. The door creaked as I pushed it open, pulled the note off, and brought it inside.
“What is it?” Salinger asked.
“I don’t know,” I told him. I peeled open the envelope and took out its contents.
It was a note. I scanned the message.
“It’s… I think it’s from Trace.”
Salinger searched my face. “What does he want?”
I handed it over to him.
“You went to the cops after I told you I didn’t mean any of it. What the fuck is wrong with you? Stupid skank,” he said, reading it out loud. “Is this guy for real?” he asked me.
“They must have followed up on my statement. I didn’t think they’d actually do that.”
“I think they have to or they’d lose their jobs. Plus, you know, it was the right thing to do?” he bit.
“They’re all so tied into their good ol’ boy club, I didn’t think they were afraid of following procedure or whatever. I only did it so I could have something on record for when I try to get the girls back, not that he doesn’t deserve to be prosecuted, but I’d given up on that happening.”
“No shit. I hope he gets jail time, the asshole. That’s probably it, though. The state is probably looking into those statements.”
My hand went to my mouth and I bit at my thumbnail. “I can’t think about this right now.”
He searched my face. “I think you should, Lily.”
“I can’t right now. I’m close to getting the girls home,” I said, falling back onto the couch. “I just have to lay low for a little while, try to find a way to get the cash for the roof.”
Salinger sat beside me, picking up his kimchi, and crossed his long legs on the coffee table. “Maybe stay at my apartment for a few days while I have a talk with this moron?”
“Maybe,” I said, biting my nail again.
“You know,” he said, swallowing a bite of food. “I know a way you could pay for the roof and floors.”
“How?”
“You could go to five or six regional chess tournaments, make some cash in a couple weeks, if you don’t mind traveling. You win every tournament you enter, you’d have more than enough, I’d think.”
I sat up a little, my heart racing. I tucked my legs under my rump. “Traveling? Like where?” I asked him.
“You could go all over the US, but we can stick to local stuff for now. We’ll register you with the USCF. I think it’s like thirty-five bucks or something. Anyway, you can start building your rating.”
“What is USCF?”
“The United States Chess Federation.”
I nodded. “I need a rating?”
“Yeah.”
“What are the levels?” I asked.
He set his food down. “So, before your first official tournament, we’d choose a tourney that had a wide range of rating players and as high as we could find so we could get your initial rating up as high as possible.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because once your initial rating is set, it’s hard to advance as quickly. You can only jump so many points each tournament. The last thing we’d want is for you to have to bump up slowly because you started out with too low a rating.”
“Okay, go on.”
“Every time you compete against a player, you have an opportunity to improve your rating.”
“Who decides who I compete against?”
“It’s done through a computer program for optimal pairings. If there’s a lot of players up, like most of the regional stuff, they’ll use a Swiss-system tournament. So you’ll get paired with people who are at your same rating level, and you can work your way up from there. You never play the same player twice and the player with the highest aggregate points wins the tournament.”
“How do you earn ratings?” I asked.
He took a swig of the beer he’d been nursing. “Okay, so, say you play someone who’s got, for instance, a similar rating number as you do and you win. You’ll get around thirty points, but if you lose, you actually go down thirty points. If you play someone at least three hundred points above you, and win, you’ll get sixty points. Lose? They deduct nothing. Lose against someone three hundred points below you, though? And they’ll deduct that sixty. Get it?”