“Get all of them, Roman. There’s still a red one in the den,” Drew said, holding his hands out, already overflowing with balls. I had the ridiculous idea that they were cleaning up until Roman dropped a red ball in Drew’s hands and he yelled, “Watch out! Here they go!” He flung the balls as hard as he could across the room.
Roman screamed in delight, running after them and then turning tail and running back when they leapt back at him, a delirious mix of terror and joy across his face. The balls ricocheted off studs, and each set out on its own wild path, thumping against us and Hershey, and then finally all rolling across the concrete, seeking out a low point. The shop lights hanging from studs with too-bright bulbs doubled and tripled the effect of the balls with wild shadows.
“Again!” Roman screamed, handing a green and white marbled ball to Drew. “Do it again!”
Hope rolled her eyes; the chaos was too much for her ordered mind. The rest of us were all in, gathering the balls and depositing them with Drew. I caught Hope’s eye and nodded up the stairs. She tiptoed up, and I knew she would go to her own room.
Drew put in four more rounds of ball-tossing glee, which had us all running and screaming after them like Roman had and then running back the other way. We could have gone on longer even though we were tired and hungry, but Hope came down to announce that the rain had really started. Even without the roof, it would be a while before it made its way down through the tongue-and-groove flooring upstairs to cover the slab. But it would, and we would have yet another mess to clean up. Sounding like broken records, we drove home, talking all the way about how much we needed a roof.
Jada was the first to throw up that night, but Roman wasn’t far behind her. Hope started closer to sunrise, and I was glad she at least had some sleep. Drew said he felt fine and went on to school. I couldn’t blame him; I would have run for the hills, too, if I had the chance. By noon, I was throwing up in between cleaning up the kids and handing out cans of ginger ale.
The stomach flu lasted for just over twenty-four hours, leaving us weak and pitiful. Dad avoided us all and by some miracle never caught it. My stomach hurt almost bad enough for me to forget how bad my back hurt. Drew was the only one unaffected, and he hid out in his room to avoid our germs. It was nice to hear rapid-fire automatic weapons echoing in his room again. It had been too long since he had time to get lost in a video game.
I thought about how I had been escaping with Benjamin and realized we each had our refuge. Jada had her dolls and toys, and Hope found peace in her craft or scrapbooking projects. I forgave Benjamin a little for leaving my kids out. Maybe they each had their own Benjamin after all.
It had rained through both nights of our sickness and most of the day on Friday. We were up bright and early on Saturday morning, even if we weren’t bushy-tailed. We arrived at Inkwell ready to do some serious work on the ceiling so we could start the rafters, which I had a number of misgivings about building—but first things first.
Drew carried the compressor and nail gun up and I followed with nails, various tools, and supplies. “Oh, crap,” he said, sounding a lot like Hope had downstairs when she saw how much water had pooled across the slab again.
“This sucks,” he continued. “I mean, this really, really sucks.”
I looked up and saw that it was worse than a few puddles. The ceiling joists we’d moved up on Wednesday had soaked up enough water to make them heavy and pliable. The weight had bent them down until they were shaped like mocking smiles rather than the rail-straight boards we needed. Maybe if we had balanced them up on end instead of laying them flat. Maybe … But there was no time for maybes. They had already dried in the morning sun. “Do you think if we flip them over?” I asked, knowing right away that it wouldn’t work.
“We’ll have to order new boards,” Drew said. “Throw these away. They’re ruined.”
We didn’t have the money to buy double supplies. And these were expensive pieces of lumber. One long board cost a lot more than two shorter boards that would add up to the same length, because they had to be cut from taller trees, which made them more difficult to make and to transport. “No way. We’ll make these work. Just give me a minute.”
He climbed up, shaking his head and flipping the boards up to balance on the short ends the way they were supposed to be.
“Let’s get the first one nailed in, then we’ll figure out the next. One at a time. We can make this work somehow. Maybe if I cut spacers to hold them the right distance apart?”
Dad made two spacers, which Drew nailed in place to hold the next joist exactly sixteen inches from the center of the first. We nailed it in place and it stayed straight, counteracting the bend in the warped board, so we did it again. It added a lot of time to the job, and it took a little more wood than we would have otherwise used, but we put spacers between every ceiling joist down the back half of the house over the rest of that day and all of the next. A job made at least four times longer than it should have been by our own stupidity. Live and learn.
The next week brought a line of thunderstorms that crippled the entire Midwest. Thankfully, our ceiling joists were safely in place and shouldn’t suffer much from the exposure. The subfloor upstairs was another story. We had already purchased cherry hardwood flooring and were worried that the plywood would be too damaged to make a stable surface for it.
I finally reached out to Pete and admitted that I was too terrified to watch my kids crawl around on the upstairs ceiling joists—twenty feet off the ground in some places—to stick-build the rafters ourselves. He was sympathetic and suggested he could bring Re-Pete and another guy over on the weekend to get the roof on. I was so thrilled that I forgot I wasn’t supposed to believe everything Pete said.
A tornado passed less than a mile from Inkwell Manor that week, peeling back roofs and tossing mobile homes around like Twinkies. “God hates trailer parks and Oklahoma,” my dad said. The familiarity of his much-repeated line made me smile.
When we arrived on site Saturday morning, I was surprised that Pete hadn’t beat us there. Drew wasn’t, but he had been uncharacteristically sluggish and in a foul mood. I was even surprised at lunch when Pete still had not arrived. We stayed busy putting up Sheetrock nailers and sweeping away water puddles, but it was still irritating. I had a whole roof not being built.
By the time Pete called at four in the afternoon, I wasn’t surprised anymore. Fool me once … okay so we were way past once.