Even in the South, December was cold. When we leaned over the edge of the trench to lop off roots, it was twenty-eight degrees and falling by the second. My feet were dead numb by the time we climbed down into the trench. Drew handed down ten-foot pieces of rebar, which is a half-inch steel rod used to reinforce concrete. I spaced the bars out in the trenches, hands so cold that the only thing saving my grip was the ribbed surface designed for a better concrete bond. We made four parallel lines of rebar all the way around the rectangle of the house and the smaller rectangle of the porch. The mini spring Jimmy pointed out had become a gusher. Drew affectionately named it the Ink Spill.
Our gloves did little more than hold a cold layer of ice water against our hands. Someone had probably invented a waterproof glove for this sort of work, but none of the videos we watched had mentioned it. I had never in my life imagined being so cold and miserable. Playing in four-foot snowbanks in a Wisconsin winter was warmer than being sopping wet in an Arkansas December. We used rocks to prop up the rebar, like Jimmy had suggested, but even they sunk in the mud slop faster than Gilligan in quicksand. Drew insisted the rebar chairs were exactly the thing we needed, so we ripped open the bag and propped a few in place. They looked like four-inch-tall traffic cones with a crescent support at the top to prop the rebar. In theory they were perfect, but their little heads vanished before we’d reached the end of the first trench.
After sunset, I turned on the headlights and we kept working with no noticeable progress. Somewhere along the way, we caught a case of the giggles. One of us mentioned that the Ink Spill could turn into the Ink Tsunami, and we imagined waves of water barreling through the trenches—which unfortunately wasn’t much of a stretch. Drew literally rolled around on a grassy spot, breath gone with laughter, while I sat next to him and smeared laughter tears with clay.
By then we had managed a system of placing flat rocks and then propping the rebar chairs on top of them. The rocks acted like miniature footers for the holders and the rebar was at least visible above the mud. “I’d say that’s a professional rebar job,” I said when I could speak again. My cheeks ached from smiling, and I loved the feel of happy tension. Our laughter needed to be pulled out and exercised more often.
“Think it will hold up Inkwell Manor?” he asked, then laughed even harder, gasping until I started to worry about him.
“What? What is it? More Ink Tsunami?” I was laughing, too, but without a target.
He shook his head. “It’s Sinkwell,” he managed between belly laughs. “Sinkwell Manor!”
“And it’s a wrap,” I said, peeling off my gloves and dragging mud-encrusted tools to the car. I twisted the key so the interior could heat while we packed up and put our shoes in shopping bags. We had flip-flops for the ride home.
We sat inside for a couple of minutes, the headlights shining on the trenches that had undergone another magical transformation, looking barely big enough for two rooms let alone a whole house. The heat sobered us while we worked through the painful sting of defrosting nerves and vessels. My nose tingled. I put the car in gear, and Drew turned on the dome light to search for his phone. I caught sight of my hands on the steering wheel and said, “Oh!”
Drew jumped and held his own hands up to the light. Like mine, they were a dead purple-gray from fingertip to wrist. We laughed most of the way home, now and then managing a word or two. “The gloves! The ink. Inkwell!”
We made it home before eleven, me hoping the ink would wash off and him hoping it wouldn’t. Hope gave us a thumbs-up when we lied and told her the work had gone perfectly. Jada and Roman were long asleep, both in my bed.
It was almost two weeks before the footing was poured. First an ice storm set us back, then the holidays, then an overbooked concrete company giving priority to contractors they knew. The delay gave us time to draw plans for a 450-square-foot workshop to store tools and supplies. It was obvious that hauling tools and supplies back and forth between houses was going to get more and more difficult. So we made a basic two-by-four frame with stakes pounded in to hold it straight—or what passed for straight in our amateur construction world. This way, when the concrete truck finally backed up our long drive it could pour both at once. At least that’s what I imagined.
In reality they made two separate pours a week apart. The foundation pour didn’t have to be smoothed much, just enough to prop concrete blocks on top. But the shop pour would actually end up being the permanent floor, so we rented long-handled floaters and did our best to make it perfect. Despite being a lifelong perfectionist, my definition of the word had relaxed dramatically over the past few months. “Good enough,” I declared when my biceps were burning and my feet were heavy enough with dried concrete to sink me in the neighbor’s pond for good.
Our nine-month construction loan was well under way, but our house was not. I pretended we could make up the time during easier phases of the build. But a little voice told me there was no such thing, and it grew more and more difficult to hear my own determination over the voice of reality.
–8–
Fall
Black, White, and Gray
An alarm woke me and I tapped buttons across the clock, searching for that sweet snooze spot. No matter what combination I hit, the noise continued. I sat up, heart thumping when I realized it was my phone. There hadn’t been a middle-of-the-night call in years.
I said something that resembled “Hello,” dimly noting that it came out a lot more like “Um-mah-oh.”
“Cara? You okay, honey?”
And then I was as fully awake as if the voice were inches from my face, one hand holding a knife and the other sketching an idea for a laser scanner to revolutionize the postal system. My next phrase sounded exactly like “Shit.” I sat up and turned on my reading lamp, expecting to see him on his side of the bed with a wild gleam in his brown eyes. He wasn’t there, of course, because he was on the other end of the phone. His papers and books were on the floor, but his side of the bed was empty and cold. He had been in his office when I went to sleep. We’d joked about the weather and he had laughed like a perfectly normal man. It worked that way too often, the normal days stretching into months until I doubted that anything was wrong at all, until I believed him when he said that it was me, that I just overreacted when he worked too hard. I clutched the phone tight enough for the plastic to groan. The light left me feeling exposed—spotlighted—so I switched it back off. “Adam? Where are you?”
“It’s so good to hear your voice. God, I’ve missed you,” he said, sounding like the old Adam, the good one, the one before all the insanity. “How are the kids?”
“They’re fine. Really good.” And I realized it wasn’t really true. I had never been a skilled actress, and hiding Adam’s vacationing mind was growing more difficult. But he had seen them earlier that night over supper and even managed part of a conversation. Why was he acting like he hadn’t seen them in years? My heart beat so fast I imagined it sounded more like a purring kitten than a human organ. The back of my head started to throb, and I could feel an artery pulsing in the side of my neck as though it were trained to gallop along quickly in preparation for Adam’s next rant.