We moved blocks until the sun faded and Roman’s teeth chattered behind mud-smeared lips. We slipped into our flip-flops for the ride home, singing the whole way because singing felt good and silence did not.
Roman zoned out in front of a cartoon after brushing his teeth. The other kids went to do the homework they had said they didn’t have, and I leaned back on the sofa at Roman’s feet with my laptop. For the first time in a long time, I made solid progress on my novel. A surprisingly gruesome murder took place that I hadn’t planned on, and I refused to analyze what that might mean. It wouldn’t take a professional headshrinker to track the subconscious correlations.
I knew it had been a successful writing night when I woke to three pages of “d”s on the screen. Almost always “d”s when I fell asleep, even though I wished just once it could be “z”s for a laugh. I carried Roman to my bed, having given up on sneaking him into his own bed. In a few months or a year he would go on his own, but maybe neither of us were ready yet.
I rolled intentionally on my side, curling into a ball to search for sleep rather than meditation time. Even though I always felt more grounded and at peace after seeing Benjamin, something about the experience still frightened me, and I didn’t have room for more fear that night. He and I would make peace, but courage doesn’t come like a lottery check, it is earned hard and slow, like Sisyphus pushing the rock uphill.
Monday at the office I was glad to sit in a cushioned chair and rest my back. I was also happy to lose my mind in the analytical process of writing code. But after I picked the kids up from school, we rushed to the job site and discussed a plan to get water hooked up.
The city had let me pull the plumbing permit with no evidence that I could tell one end of a pipe from the other. And no, one end of a pipe is not always the same as the other. The permit office seemed to have as much confidence in my ability to learn from YouTube videos as the bank, so I gave it everything I had.
I finally discovered that I could hire a crew with a drilling contraption to bore a hole under the road to hook the water pipe into the city main. Nearly waist-deep in mud, I struggled to look professional, wiping the end of the muddy pipe in my armpit and then holding it up with my knees to smear it with purple PVC prep and glue. The pipe wasn’t much larger in diameter than a garden hose, which looked pitifully small to supply an entire house. But I’d watched videos, read articles, and even asked the guys at the home-improvement store, and the verdict was unanimous. The basketball-size pipes I had always imagined carrying rivers of water down the street and to my house did not exist. Even the city’s line down my street was only about the size of my ankle.
I managed to glue in another twenty feet before I capped it off. That left me a nonfunctional water line about 230 feet from the front of the house, which even under my very loose definition of success these days barely qualified. It wasn’t a step backward, so there was that. A trencher was the next step, and my old tractor friend Jimmy had promised to call me back with the name of a guy who had one.
I was still battling the electricians—on the phone, I mean, since I’d yet to see them in person. They had snuck in once when I wasn’t around to wire fuses and a shutoff into the temp box, which hung crookedly from the four-by-four I had mostly secured in the mud. The city had told them which main pole to hook my line to, but the person who owned the land around the pole blocked the dirt road with a locked gate and refused to let the electricians enter. As much as I hated conflict, I would have to deal with them eventually. I imagined the conversation starting with “I don’t care if you’re cooking crack back here or planting fields of funky stuff, I just need to hang a wire on that tall pole. I won’t see or hear anything else that goes on—I swear.”
While Roman and I waited for the trencher one afternoon, the electricians nearly gave me a heart attack when they drove right up behind me. The two of them rolled out of the car and landed on their widespread feet, the truck door releasing a cloud of funky smoke that nearly blew me over. Naturally, they were in a fine, mellow mood and friendly as could be, each munching a family-size bag of Funyuns.
Between crunches, the tall one said, “That man ain’t gonna let you over there. Not ever. Says you’ll cut a gas line if you dig to the pole.”
“But you ain’t got no choice. City says that’s your pole, then that’s your pole,” the shorter, wider man said, wiping Funyun powder on his flannel shirttail over a trail that proved it wasn’t the first time.
I raised my eyebrows and waited for them to tell me something I didn’t know, but nope, that was pretty much all they had. “So I guess we have to go over there and talk to him? Explain things? Tell him he has to?”
“We?” shorty said. “You got a mouse in your pocket?” They both laughed too hard to notice the way I leaned on the bumper of their truck and sniffed away looming tears.
“Mouse,” Roman said. “We got a mouse. Meow.” He eyed their snack and I realized he could be inhaling some residual smoke standing this close, so I carried him to the shop.
The electricians sauntered over to admire the pole, which was actually standing straighter than either of them. Hershey followed, vacuuming a trail of crumbs.
Since we were running out of things we could do on the job site without a better understanding of foundation work, I didn’t have much to keep me busy while the electricians did their thing. I wiped the dirt off a curved piece of metal Jada had dug up. Then, probably because I was in the mood to hit something, I pushed a ladder under the shop door, pulled the nail from my pocket—Caroline’s nail—and hung the curved metal over the door. It wasn’t exactly a lucky horseshoe, but close enough. Caroline’s nail was now a solid part of our build. Her life connected directly with ours.
“Be back next week,” skinny electrician said, picking at a hangnail. “Already contacted One Call to mark lines for the dig.”
“You ought to let him know.” Shorty nodded through the forest at where the neighbor’s house had started to look a lot like the house of the witch who cooked Hansel and Gretel.
I nodded, though I didn’t really think I had the courage to do it.
Roman waved while Tweedledum and Tweedledee backed a crooked line down the hill, waving back like happy two-year-olds.
Things were starting to feel out of control. Only a month in and we were so paralyzed by the idea of setting the blocks that we did nothing more than shuffle them from one spot to the next each day. Even though I had given my perfectionist-self permission for small mistakes along the way, I knew the foundation was not a place for mistakes of any size. I still believed plan Bs were for sissies, but I was willing to accept the label.
On the way home I called Pete. “Any chance you can come by and get us started laying block?” I asked, voice quavering.
He agreed to meet me at the site that evening—and I believed him.