“One more,” Drew said. “Let’s build the inside wall between the den and library so we have something to brace these to.”
He was right. But even after we built it, the idea of the bracing process made me nervous. A long, skeleton of a wall won’t stand up on its own. We had to nail long boards on each end to use for support. If we had a wooden floor, we would have nailed the braces to the floor. With the concrete slab, we had to brace the walls against one another and nothing would feel stable until we had more walls up to increase support options. Houses were a lot flimsier than I ever imagined. I took a deep breath. “Library wall first. The one we rebuilt. We’re going to need all hands on deck, and yes that means you, Jada.”
I settled Roman in his mini lawn chair with a blueberry Pop-Tart, and we stood at the top of the wall, with Drew and me on each end and Hope and Jada spaced in the middle. Hope had rolled a thin layer of blue foam along the edge of the concrete floor slab, pushing holes in it with the threaded ties sticking out from the edge of the slab. The foam insulation wasn’t used in every build, but I’d read about it and liked the idea of the extra insulation and moisture barrier. The ties were essentially extra-large bolts and would push through the bottom plate of the wall and help hold it in place during tornadoes or other potential disasters—like the crash of a poorly braced wall built by amateurs. They didn’t actually hold the wall together, but they did snug it up tight to the floor. Slowly, and with grins wider than our fears, we walked our hands from the top down to the middle as we stepped forward. The holes we’d drilled in the bottom plate matched perfectly to the threaded bolts, and the foam insulation stayed in place. It was a minor miracle.
“Now what?” Jada asked.
I pretended I wasn’t wondering the same thing. “Hope and Jada, hold the brace things. They’ll work like handles while Drew and I get the other wall.” We had nailed ten-foot two-by-fours at each end to brace against other walls, and they made decent handgrips to support the wall. I glanced over my shoulder at Roman. His feet were propped on a wall with our front door framed at one end, his attention split equally between the wall raising and his treat. Drew and I pushed the next wall up and met the corners together. The top-heavy window frame made it almost as wobbly as my nerves. “If it starts to fall, just let it go!” I told him, hysteria creeping into my voice. I had a nightmare image of the kids trying to stop the walls and plummeting over the edge of the slab with them. It was an eight-foot fall off this corner, which made me regret insisting that we start with the library.
Drew shot at least a dozen nails into the corner and was only halfway up from the slab.
“Let’s not make Swiss cheese. Get it tacked and move to the braces.” Our eyes met. He was just as uncertain about the stability as I was. “The corner’s good, Jada. Let go of your brace and come here.” I pulled a handful of large washers from the back pocket of my jeans and thumped my toe on the bolt end sticking up through the bottom plate of the wall. “Put one of these on each one. Then come back and get the nuts.”
She ran back for the nuts, and finger-tightened them with so much enthusiasm that I worried she would strip the skin off her fingers.
Drew had done all he could with the braces until we had another wall. “Another interior wall next,” he said. “I want to run a cross brace.”
I nodded, but found I couldn’t let go of my end of the wall. It might fall. We might have done it wrong. The whole thing could crash right over the edge. What if … I wanted to hold my hands over my ears to stop the million what-ifs. But instead, I answered the question. If it falls over the edge, we’ll pick it up, salvage what we can, and try again. That’s what. Is that so bad? Can I live with that? Yeah. That’s actually no big deal. Not in the grand scheme of things, anyhow. I can live with that. I let go.
“We built a house!” Roman said, spinning in a circle next to his chair.
“Sit down, Roman,” Hope said. “You can come see the house after we do one more wall, okay? Sit for just a little longer.”
He sat with his fingers laced on his knees, watching like he might shout out a few pointers concerning our technique.
The next wall went up quickly but came with its own unique challenges. It didn’t have insulation under it or the threaded ties to hold it to the slab. To keep it from shifting around, we had to bring out the big guns—and real bullets. A nail had to be driven through the bottom plate—the bottom horizontal board that vertical wall boards are nailed to—and into the concrete. This terrifying job was all mine. The nail gun hooked to the compressor wasn’t powerful enough. I would have to drive the nails in with a device that looked a lot like a telescope but actually fired .22 blanks, blasting the nail through both wood and concrete.
I crouched at the far end of the wall, dropping the shell twice before fitting it into the middle of the tool. The three-inch masonry nail went into the business end of the power hammer. This was the closest I had come to crying since we started. I lifted the tool upright and took a breath so deep that my right ear popped. “Earplugs. I forgot.” The delay made me so happy that I tried in vain to think up a reason for another one.
The kids watched with sympathetic grimaces. They could see that I was scared but weren’t about to take my place. I lifted the gun, carefully choosing the right spot to rest the nail end, and tried the same trick I had relied on throughout this enormous, impossible project: imagining the worst possible outcome and reminding myself that we could get through it. What was the worst-case scenario? Oh, Jesus. I didn’t even want to think about it. I lifted the hammer and after a practice aim realized I was just as terrified of smashing my hand with the hammer as I was of the crazy tool malfunctioning.
“Pretend it’s Thor’s hammer. Forget about the gun thing.” Drew’s voice was muted through the earplugs, but it still made me smile.
I lifted the hammer and brought it down hard. The .22 shell fired, and I swore I could feel the air around me expand and contract with the blast. The echo sounded for miles. Sulfur and burnt-paper scent drifted up. The tool wobbled in my grip and I let it go, more interested now in the results than in the weapon. I’d driven the nail clean in, crushing the little orange plastic cap around the nail head. The kids’ eyes were wide, fingers still up by their ears, when I turned around and grinned.
“Nailed it!” I said, feeling damn proud of myself. But when I pulled the earplugs out, I could hear Roman whimpering. I hugged him and admired his latest frog-in-a-pail, Bufford. “Hope is going to play with you for a few minutes while we get this wall finished. Then we’ll take a break, okay?”
“And a fire?” he asked.
“Maybe a fire. It’s warm today though. We might not need one.”
“I need one.”