I held back on the victory dance. “Jada, come help us with the wall!”
She stood at one end, Drew stood in the middle, and I stood at the end that needed to line up with the front of the slab. We heaved the wall up, little Jada pushing with all her might, leaning forward until she was a diagonal line, braces glinting in the sunlight. It was exhilarating. We were powerful heroes who had created a recognizable wall from a pile of mismatched sticks. The wall wobbled and undulated in a strong gust of wind, reminding us that we were human after all. Drew nailed the first brace in place. I put washers over the bolts sticking out of the slab and tightened nuts over them. Then we stood in a line off the slab, Roman on my hip and the older kids next to me, admiring a job well done.
“We can do this,” I said, relieved and energized. “There’s the proof.” As though framing one basic wall was proof of anything more than our determination. But it was a lot more rewarding than the concrete work had been. It rose above the ground like a living thing.
“Can we have a fire now?” Hope asked. “Roman’s pants need to be dried out.”
“Marshmallows!” Roman shouted, a campfire image he’d gotten from television rather than a real-life marshmallow roast.
I knew it took a lot of courage for Hope to ask. When she was five, an obsidian candle holder had exploded on our dining-room table, and the wax pool had ignited across the surface. It had taken only seconds for me to put it out, but it remained part of Hope’s psyche forever. She wouldn’t go to fireworks displays and paced in worry circles if I lit too many candles at once. Before that day, an open fire in an outdoor pit would have been just crazy talk to her.
She had constructed a pyramid of small sticks over crumpled phone-book pages. Any Boy Scout would have been impressed. I lit a match and held it to the “P” page. Prim, Primble, and Prime were licked away by the orange tongue. I had expected to need most of the matchbook for our first fire, but that tiny flame was all it took. Jada handed me branches as big around as my wrist and a thick log with damp fungus along one side.
Hope stuck long branches in the ground outside the fire’s ring and hung Roman’s pants and socks from them. “Poor lonely pants, with nobody inside them,” I said, quoting from a favorite Dr. Seuss story that had always scared my kids into a tight snuggle at bedtime. Roman giggled at the pants and poked the muddy thighs with a stick. They wiggled and danced, making him giggle more. He was already wearing his backup clothes. With all the puddles on site he would be rotating hourly from one outfit to the other. He had plastic bags between his socks and shoes but clearly needed a pair of rubber boots. It was yet another way we were unprepared for the reality of a job site.
We framed the entire workshop by that afternoon, including a thirty-six-inch entry door but excluding the garage door. I wanted to read more about that before we tried to build the heavy header to go over the top of it. In addition to the braces nailed to stakes out in the yard, we cross-braced the walls with long two-by-fours nailed from the top of one wall down to the bottom of the other. I had no idea how sturdy it was without the rafters, so I wasn’t taking any chances.
The hollow structure was long and narrow. “It looks like a ship,” I said when we all stood back to admire the work.
“Like a whale, with the ribs and everything,” Jada said. “A whale with his head chopped off.”
“Chop. Chop. Chop.” Roman whacked a spindly branch against the two-by-fours at the front corner.
I held my breath, worried that we couldn’t possibly have done it, built something solid enough to stand up to a two-year-old. But the shop held up to his chopping, and to a strong wind that blew a pile of leaves into a whirling dervish. I closed my eyes and smiled. It was the first time I had built something so much larger than myself.
Roman threw his stick down and rubbed his eyes. A low whine led into a wide yawn. He had been pulled past his endurance point after another day he would have described as one of the best of his life if he had the words. Mud, rocks, sticks, and two-year-olds are the best of pals.
I found a pattern for rafters that night and an example of how to draw a chalk template on the slab so each rafter could be laid out, matched up, and built identical to the last. It was a great method, and it was too bad I hadn’t read about it in time to use it. Our slab was crisscrossed with a network of braces that we didn’t dare take down.
The next morning, Drew and I modified the idea by pounding stakes into the ground for a rough template. I made what felt like hundreds of diagonal cuts for the crosspieces, and he nailed them together. Later I would learn that we’d used twice as much lumber as we needed to, building a roof that would take a ten-foot snow load. It may have been sturdy, but it wasn’t anywhere near perfectly straight.
I eyeballed the surface we’d need to cover with four-by-eight sheets of plywood. “It ain’t no church,” I said. It had been my dad’s saying whenever a project strayed just left of perfection.
“More importantly,” Drew added, “it isn’t my room.”
The next day, I met a guy named Pete at the lumberyard near a mountain of two-by-fours. He was stocky with red hair and cheeks, a fireplug of a guy tucking away a pinch of mint tobacco. He was born right in Little Rock and had never left the state. “Don’t see a reason anyone should leave a perfectly good state,” he said. I learned this and a lot more because he had absolutely no rules about personal space. He was also overflowing with building tips and personal information that crossed all lines of oversharing. We traded project stories and he gave me his card in case we needed a hand along the way. (I’ve no idea what clues he’d picked up on that suggested we might have one building emergency or another.)
I tucked his number away with no intention of calling a stranger in to our family project. But when he explained the ordering error that had made framing our shop a hundred times more difficult because of the shoddy boards, he won me over. Best of all, he was the first person I’d encountered who believed I could build a house without a hint of a loan-officer smirk. In short, I liked him.
“Those eight-foot two-by-fours is for scrap stuff. Like building a frame for concrete, nothing that matters much if you run up on a twist or bubble. Cheap, but you can’t use ’em for framing. No one does that.” He laced his fingers together over the top of his little potbelly, much in the way a pregnant woman might. “Biggest problem if you frame with ’em is they’re near eight-foot long.”