“I want green,” Roman said, pointing at the blue one.
“Just stay by the ditch, not the pond. Don’t let Roman anywhere near the pond.” It was a mom thing to say. An ordinary warning exactly like countless others I’d issued over the past seventeen years. But this time my throat squeezed closed and a knife of pain rocketed through my stomach. Things were good, which made me terrified that they would swing back to bad in order to set the universe at ease. Long ago, Adam had given me a scare about drowning kids that still hit my gut hard when I least expected it.
I leaned against the tool bench, head low like I was looking at something important and very, very small next to the vise grip.
“We need to start planning the staircase,” Drew said. “The downstairs is almost finished!”
I forced myself upright. This was no way to live. It was time to focus, push forward, grow up. We were alive, and we might as well live. Growing old isn’t for sissies, my grandpa used to say.
“I’m still researching the stairs,” I said. “My math keeps going all wrong when I try to plan them. Every try ends with new numbers.” I had left two messages asking Pete for help but hadn’t heard back. “This skeleton frame may look complete, but it’s just the first step. We have to add the top plate and ceiling joists next. And add the Sheetrock nailers and support nailers for curtain rods, towel holders, and shelves. There are holes to drill for plumbing and electric. The plywood has to go up on the exterior before we do the joists. Remember how unstable the shop was when we put the rafters up before the plywood? We don’t want to try that here. Oh, and we have to mark every light switch and outlet since we don’t have a formal electric plan. Trust me—we aren’t going to run out of work before the stairs are built.”
He had zoned out on me after the first few items on the to-do list, but I had needed dozens of work images to fill my head so there was no room for anything else. Seconds later, he flipped over a milk crate for the old radio and put on Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song.” Jack Johnson followed with some banana pancakes, and that yielded to techno, which demanded robotic dubstep moves from Drew. Bit by bit, we were filling our souls with good things. Replacing the bad memories with good ones.
I danced a few graceless steps and spun the heavy header for the pantry door in a circle, grasping it like a partner. The kids rolled their eyes. I liked it when they treated me like an ordinary, embarrassing mom instead of a fellow prisoner of war.
Hope held the cripples in place while Drew nailed them. She didn’t even flinch with the pop and hiss of the gun. He was becoming a real expert, and we were all gaining confidence.
“Let’s lift the kitchen wall. Clear more room to move.” I loaded a .22 shell into the Ramset nailer, feeling reckless and excited about blowing a nail through concrete. We hadn’t put nails in the exterior walls, because the bolts were there, but one of the bolts had stripped and wouldn’t take a nut, so the nails would have to do. “Ears!” My voice was a stranger’s through my earplugs. I smacked the top of the ram gun with a framing hammer and felt the numbing jolt in my fingers. A chunk of concrete flew off the side of the slab.
“Umm. Mommy? That wasn’t supposed to happen.” Drew dispensed his fifteen-year-old wisdom freely, especially when I’d done something stupid.
“Too close to the edge. Angled it wrong,” I said, slipping in another nail.
“Go too far the other way and it’ll go through your knee.” He shrugged.
A dry hickory leaf drifted down and skimmed my cheek. I reloaded, wondering how effective a Ramset would be as a weapon while I sunk the next nail. Grins all the way around. The nail was tucked firmly through the treated bottom plate of the wall and into the concrete floor slab. The chip from my first attempt wasn’t too bad. Since we were using all two-by-sixes instead of two-by-fours in order to get a higher insulation value, the wall would be plenty stable. A wave of shrugs passed from youngest to oldest. Nothing to worry about—it was unanimous.
“Meet the construction gurus of Inkwell Manor,” Drew said. “Fear our superior skills!”
Within the hour we had a pantry and a laundry room. The entire downstairs—minus the three-car garage—was framed, at least in the most basic sense of the word. We could finally get a full sense of what it felt like to be in the space we would call home. Even though we could walk right through the stud walls, it felt more solid than the house we lived in. It also felt one hundred percent ours. But it wasn’t only ours. It was flooded with an energy from deep in the earth, and the combined energy of a million women that I had grown accustomed to calling Caroline. We were not alone.
Jada and Roman tracked mud in and out of the house, and that’s what it was now, not a slab but a house. They set up an elaborate potion-making factory in the kitchen. An inventory of buckets, cups, and paper plates loaded with a variety of soils, seeds, grass, leaves, and algae lined a bowed eight-foot two-by-ten. Baby-food jars of spiders, frogs, and a lone crawdad solidified their product line and made me worry a little about Jada’s latest reading list. Maybe she should back away from Harry Potter for a while.
Over supper sandwiches, we wandered through the rooms, silently imagining our future. The sofa here. The secretary desk there. My mom’s plant stand just here, with a stack of antique books angled on top and a mirror just behind it. We were all starting to feel very comfortable in the primitive structure. Trying it on like a second skin.
“Ready to try some plywood?” I asked, knowing it wasn’t going to be as easy or as much fun as the framing had been.
Drew and Hope nodded, believing just the opposite.
The walls looked like the hollow ribs of a ship, three-dimensional but not solid. The next step was nailing four-by-eight sheets of half-inch-thick plywood on the entire exterior to create a more solid, stable structure. The library wasn’t the most logical place to begin, and it was definitely not the easiest, since the slab was nearly eight feet off the ground. But I was a sucker for symbolism, so it was where we began, setting up two ten-foot ladders at the corner. Hope and I would have to carry the four-by-eight sheet of plywood up and hold it in place while Drew secured it with the nail gun.
“I’m set,” Drew said from nearly twenty feet over our heads. He was standing on a ladder inside the house, ready to lean over the top and pop nails in.