Roman and Jada were playing upstairs when I woke. The sun was up, but it was a cloudy, gray winter day, the sort made for sleeping in and watching movies with repeated rounds of hot tea, hot coffee, and hot cocoa. Not for us, of course, but for other people. For people who left house building to the experts.
I made coffee, smiling over how necessary the dark brew had become. I’d never been a coffee drinker, only taking small sips on occasion, and then only when it was more cream than brew. While I wasn’t exactly drinking it black these days, I was certainly turning more mainstream, with a touch of cream and barely any sugar. Jada and Roman slid down the stairs on their butts, fuzzy pajama bottoms turning the ride slick. Still, it looked more painful than any spanking they’d ever had from me.
“Pie! I want apple pies and roast beast!” Roman shouted, right hand raised as though he had triumphantly slain the beast himself.
“That’s exactly what Christmas pie is for,” I said, cutting a slice of apple for myself. “For breakfast.” I had always started baking the desserts early so they were spread out over the entire holiday break. “You’ll have to wait until Santa comes to eat the roast beast though.”
Hope joined us, making a plate of beef-and-bean burritos for breakfast. Jada had cereal, dropping a couple of fresh cranberries in the milk in place of strawberries. We all laughed at her puckered face when she bit into the first one, and then harder when she stubbornly bit the second. All berries are not created equal, dear child.
I glanced at Drew’s door at the top of the stairs, wishing he would join us but knowing he would more likely wait until the kitchen was empty before he poured himself a mug of coffee, blacker and more manly than my own, and carried it back upstairs to drink in front of his computer.
Hershey and I did a quick search of the front and back porch, looking for signs of anything out of place. Then I spread out the plans for the workshop on the table and erased the window. Every window I’d ever seen in a shop was covered over with stacks of lumber or shelves of nails. We would have electricity out there for overhead lights, and in order to get the riding lawn mower in I’d put a garage door at one end to let in plenty of sunlight. Besides, I was nervous about framing windows and doors. One less would make everything easier. The lumber was already on site, wrapped in plastic ribbons like an enormous gift. Building the shop would be perfect practice, like framing a mini house.
Drew finally came down for a cup of coffee and stood over my shoulder with it, looking at the plans we’d drawn on the back of Jada’s math homework.
“Want to try out that nail gun today?” I asked, expecting him to resist.
“Sure. What time?” he asked, standing taller.
“Let’s get dressed and go. Nothing else to do around here today.”
The kids dressed in construction clothes and old coats faster than I’d ever seen them get ready for school. I wondered if they would be so anxious to pick up a hammer a month from now, or six months. The novelty would wear off for all of us, but hopefully our determination would not. If they gave up, I couldn’t finish on my own. No plan B. No way out.
The city wouldn’t let me put in my own temporary electrical pole, which was probably a good call on their part. So I called an electrician who promised to do it cheap if I picked up the parts and had everything waiting for him. I’d done my part, even securing the box to the pole and using a post-hole digger to put it in place—a job I’d rather not repeat anytime soon, in the red clay with more quartz rock per square inch than there were chips in Hope’s overloaded chocolate chip cookies. Weeks later, the electrician had delayed a dozen times, and we were left with no power to run our tools or lights.
A generous neighbor, Timothy, had offered to let us run an extension cord down the hill, past his pond, and to his pump house to run any tools we needed until the pole was hooked up. Timothy was tall and lanky, a Yankee transplant who embraced Southern living so fully that he planted okra and black-eyed peas in his garden and even had a pseudo-Southern twang that made me smile for its precision and proper grammar. I had had no intention of taking him up on his kind offer, but on that cold December morning it’s exactly what we did. I plugged in the tiny air compressor I’d bought at a discount hardware store and fired it up. Drew hooked up the nail gun, eyes alight. I pretended to defer to him because he was the one who had read the instruction manual, but I was secretly as terrified of the wicked-looking gun as he was delighted. To him and every other fifteen-year-old boy on the planet, it looked more like a zombie-killing machine from a video game than it looked like hard work.
Jada collected large rocks to make a fire ring at the back of the property, and Hope gathered sticks to make a fire. Roman filled a bucket with sweetgum balls to use as kindling. I hadn’t actually made a fire outdoors more than a couple of times in my life, but I had a pack of matches, a thick old phone book, and piles of determination. We needed a warm, central spot for breaks, a place that felt like a vacation, even if it only lasted minutes.
I laid out the first shop wall, starting with a straight run that had no surprises. This phase of the build was called framing. I knew that much even if I didn’t know exactly how to do it. The frame of a house would actually be better described as the skeleton. But skeletoning a house sounds too much like a horror novelist’s verb, so nailing together all the rib-like boards that hide inside the walls is called framing instead. I started with a sixteen-foot-long two-by-four that would become the top of a wall. Every sixteen inches I marked the edge of it with a penciled “X.” Then I made a matching one for the bottom of the wall, laid the two of them on the concrete slab eight feet apart, and ran eight-foot two-by-fours between them. The workshop was large, thirteen by thirty-three, so we’d have plenty of long, straight stretches to practice.
“These two-by-fours suck,” Drew said, helping me line them up with each “X” on the bottom plate. “Look at that one, it’s twisted like a ribbon, and full of knots.”
“Yeah. They don’t even seem to be the same length. Do you think that matters?”
He shrugged. “I think they just gave you the crappiest stuff they could find.”
We nailed the first wall together and found that length did matter—a lot. “We’ll have to take it apart,” I said, “and trim them all to the same length.”
He started measuring and decided on the length we would use, marking each board with his new neon-orange construction pencil. “Are you sure you ordered the right wood?” he asked.
And of course I wasn’t. There wasn’t a single part of this project that I was sure of. “I said two-by-fours. The salesperson asked ‘Eight-foot?’ and I said yes.”
Drew started in with the nail gun, both of us jumping a little with each shot, and me terrified that he would put one through my legs as I knelt on the wall to hold the crooked boards in place with my weight. Even through our fears, we were grinning like fools.
“Looks perfect!” he said.