“Fourteen feet is what we planned.” I waved Drew to the corner. “Measure out and see how close we are with the pipe.” I made pencil marks at three points and was pleased that we were almost exactly on the mark with our plans. But we hadn’t really understood how large the pipes would be when we drew the plans, so we would be two inches off on the other side. The wet wall had to be constructed with two-by-sixes instead of two-by-fours, to allow room for the four-inch sewer line coming down from the toilet.
“No more playing with the tools, Jada. They aren’t toys!” Hope snatched the chalk line and picked stray bits of dirt and bark away before winding it up.
“Ask me before you play with a tool. And even if I give you permission, they have to be back in the shop before we leave the site.”
Jada nodded, still looking at her feet.
“You can use my tools.” Roman offered his mud-crusted net with a grin.
“If you and Roman gather sticks and sweetgum balls, I’ll make a fire later,” I said, knowing it would be just the thing to cheer her up.
They ran off, swerving for maximum puddle exposure. Less than an hour on site and their jeans were already splattered with red mud from ankle to butt.
Hope wound the chalk line in and shook the case to recoat the string with fresh chalk powder. We stretched the line and popped marks for the library walls, carefully leaving spaces for the French doors. Then we went back to the laundry room and marked it out. That pipe was off by about three inches. Still not the end of the world as far as amateur builds went.
I felt powerful, moving whole walls this way and that like giant chess pieces. The kids were getting into it, too, really feeling the house as a three-dimensional space for the first time. By the time Jada and Roman asked for lunch, all the downstairs walls were marked. It had taken longer than I expected, but I was a firm believer in measuring ten times and building once—or twice.
Drew built a fire in the rock ring and we sat around it with our sandwiches, each staring into the blaze and chewing in the same slow rhythm of the licking flames. I looked down and found my plate empty except for a piece of crust. I clicked my tongue and tossed it to Hershey. She caught it and turned her eyes on Jada, the most likely source of dropped food.
Roman was sagging in his mini lawn chair, sandwich gone and eyes closed.
I carried him to his pallet in the shop. Hershey looked forlorn to leave the food, but she followed and settled next to Roman to keep guard. I sat on a can of concrete sealer and closed my eyes. I just needed one second. The bucket tipped a little and a realized I had dozed off and almost fallen over.
Drew stood in the doorway. “Can we build a wall?” he asked.
I knew how he felt; I was anxious, too. “We have to mark the windows and exterior doors. Then we can try a wall.”
“Sounds easy,” he said, as though we hadn’t already learned that none of this was as easy as it looked on paper.
We marked windows first, measuring a half dozen times, and then starting again. The interior wall placement had some leeway, but windows would be seen from the outside by other people. They had to be perfect. And since I hadn’t even ordered them yet, I wasn’t exactly sure what size the rough frame should be. We worked our way around the house and then added the doors and window to the garage, except the overhead garage doors, which would take a few more phone calls to figure out.
The number of decisions I had to make on the spot that day frightened me. There were no other adults to ask, Does that sound right? What do you think? It was all on me, and I was starting to feel the weight of it. It didn’t take a genius or a licensed contractor to know that the decision overload would snowball over the next few months.
Because Drew needed it, we framed out one long, windowless, doorless library wall before we called it a day. The top and bottom pieces for the wall were sixteen feet long, just like they had been in the shop, but they were six inches wide instead of four in order to better insulate the house. I marked every sixteen inches on the top and bottom plates while Hope lined up the eight-foot-tall boards between them and Drew locked them in place with the nail gun. We couldn’t push it upright, because we weren’t sure how to brace a solitary wall that was eight feet off the ground at the base, but even flat on the ground it felt like progress.
Daylight was fading and Roman had gone cranky. “Let’s head home. We’ll look at the walls again tomorrow. Maybe get a couple set in place.” I wanted to build the walls as much as Drew did, but my understanding of framing the corners, doors, and windows was shaky. There were precious few purely straight walls in the open floor plan.
“Doesn’t look like we did a thing,” Drew said as we pulled down the driveway.
“Some days the work is invisible, but taking time to set it all up will make the next few days a thousand times more productive.”
Roman named things out the window all the way home. “Horse! Red truck-truck-truck. That pond. Kid. See that kid? Motorcycle. Horse. That a school. School.”
No one else spoke. Building was hard work, both inside and out. Without realizing it, we had learned to be very comfortable flat on our faces in the mud, where a fall wouldn’t hurt as bad. Now that we were stretching upward, redefining ourselves, a backward tumble would really hurt. And when you’ve had a lifetime of people sticking their legs out on the school bus to trip you, it’s hard to really believe this time will be different. This time you won’t fall flat. This time you’ll build higher and higher until you’ve built yourself a safe place.
While the kids showered, I made a chicken stir-fry with extra water chestnuts because Jada and Roman giggled over the way they crunched. It was the sort of night extra giggles might be needed. We’d all become pros at looking forward instead of back, but exhaustion slowed our forward momentum enough for the past to nip at our heels.
I pushed the stir-fry to rest on the back burner and ran to take a shower while the rice finished. Over the past seventeen years I’d become master of the speed-shower.
The kids were wet-headed and soapy-fresh when I came out. Hope directed Jada and Drew to set the table and move the food there while she made cherry Kool-Aid.
“Juice?” I asked.
She shook her head.
“Milk?” But I waved a hand as soon as I asked. We’d used the last of that for breakfast. The to-do list was long enough that things were falling off the tattered ends.
“Don’t pour any Kool-Aid for me. I’ll have water.” I knew we’d run out of sugar next.
Jada and Roman were kneeling and standing on chairs at the dining-room table, peering into the stir-fry, when I carried drinks in.
“Oooo I see dem crunchies!” Roman said, clapping. The doorbell rang and he jumped, face stretched back like he was saying Eeeeeeee. He leapt from the chair toward me and I barely managed to catch him under one arm. He swung out and back again before I secured the other arm and pulled him close. I kissed his forehead, and he dropped his head to my shoulder, holding tight.
We were brushing at the edges of feeling safe and secure, but we weren’t there yet. A neighbor boy selling discount shopping cards for his baseball team still set us all on edge, wide-eyed and pale. At least for now, only our hearts were running at marathon speed. Our feet were firm and unbudging. We were planting roots.
–12–
Fall