I wished he’d say the words, speak out loud that he was proud of me. How long had it been since I had heard words like that from anyone but my parents? Years. He didn’t speak, and I realized he probably never would. The look in his eyes would have to be enough. I exhaled, at peace, and slept right through my morning alarm.
The kids would be in the way at the job site, with the Sheetrock guys spraying the finish texture inside and hanging the sheets in the garage ceiling over our insulation. I left them at the house with a list of simple chores and went to my doctor for a tetanus shot. Dr. Sam—short for Samantha—gave me a list of things to watch for with the puncture wound. It had a high risk of infection, but she thought it looked clean considering the conditions it had happened under. I was thankful I didn’t need stitches.
I wished I could go home for a nap, but had to go in to the office instead. My commute was about twenty-five minutes, and that was the only time I ever found myself alone. I realized on that drive that I was feeling restless and a little vengeful, so I started thinking about Caroline again. She had been lying low lately, and I missed her. There were still things I needed to learn from her strength.
When I got home, the Sheetrock foreman called to say the job was done and ready for me to check out, which was code for “Come over and write me a check.”
The kids were as anxious to see the finished walls as I was, so we loaded into the car with Hershey and drove over.
“I can’t believe how many rooms there are!” Jada said, dancing through the upstairs. “Just a few days ago, I could walk through that wall!” She bumped up against the wall separating her room from one of the upstairs bathrooms.
The first thing I noticed was how much quieter it was. Work in one room didn’t echo through the entire house and ricochet through my skull like it had for months. We all went to our own rooms, except Roman, who bounced among all of them like a pinball. I lay down in the spot where my bed would be and stared at the ceiling. Even though we were a long way from finished, even though my calf ached, I couldn’t stop smiling. We were actually doing it. We were building our own house, and it looked every bit as good as what a real construction crew could have built.
Red. I would put red curtains in my room and a fuzzy rug beside my bed to curl my toes in. “We’re a kick-ass family,” I whispered to Caroline, and I felt her smile along with me. She’d been hanging out in the shadows all along.
It was the first of August, which made the countdown to our September 13 deadline impossibly close. The rest of our to-do list was on us, and it was more like three months long if everything went perfectly. Impossible. But we’d done impossible before, albeit not when we were quite so exhausted. The stolen minutes to look at the ceiling were a guilty pleasure we couldn’t afford. I sat up. “Drew? You ready to put in a couple doors?”
He didn’t answer, so I stalled for him, reviewing the list on my phone. Doors, trim, caulk, paint, hardwood flooring, concrete flooring, tile, showers, bathtubs, toilets, cabinets installed, stain and finish cabinets, make concrete countertops, install sinks and plumbing fixtures, lights, switches, outlets, stairs, rails, exterior porch rails, back steps and rail, garage doors, concrete slab, library shelves. I rearranged the items in what I guessed was the right order.
It really wasn’t possible. Not even for an experienced construction crew working overtime. Our budget was too tight to hire workers, because I had no intention of using all the money the bank had approved. If I did, I wouldn’t be able to afford the final mortgage of Inkwell. This was a low-budget build. I had to make it work.
I found Drew downstairs. He had carried in three doors by himself and propped them against the wall in the dining room. While it would have been nice to believe he realized how overwhelming our list was, I knew his enthusiasm was because he thought we were almost finished. As hard as we’d been pushing for almost eight months, the final six weeks were going to be even more difficult, and we were going in feeling fully spent. I didn’t say any of this to the kids. Whatever well they could find to pull enthusiasm from, I wouldn’t dampen it. Not yet.
The girls were cleaning the upstairs, getting the floor ready for the hardwood, which was in two-inch tongue-and-groove strips that would be glued to the subfloor. Roman was in his room, zooming Matchbox cars—real ones rather than painted rocks—around and around the stack of hardwood flooring. Drew and I installed the laundry-room and pantry doors faster than we had any of the exterior doors, but the downstairs bathroom went wrong and then more wrong before we got it to close evenly. It was dark by the time we finished, and we were working with a shop light that put off a lot of heat. “Enough doors for tonight,” I said, expecting Drew to want to head back to the house.
“Those last sheets of plywood are blocking the upstairs doors. What are we doing with those?” he asked.
It was good to think of our building supplies as the last ones. The last two-by-sixes, the last plywood, the last nails, screws, or Liquid Nails. “I thought we’d use them in the attic for storage platforms.”
“Let’s carry them up before we leave, so the doors are ready to go when we come back.”
My calf was throbbing, but I didn’t want to stand in the way of his momentum. We needed every extra push we could get. All the months of building had made for some impressive muscles. Drew had turned from a pasty-white, thin, geeky boy into a tan, muscled young man. Before the Sheetrock went up, he could jump up and grab the ceiling joists and pull himself up through them effortlessly. My muscles hadn’t built quite as much as his, but I definitely had muscles I hadn’t believed I owned. Carrying the four-by-eight sheets of plywood upstairs took little effort.
The attic door hadn’t been installed, so there was just a hole in the ceiling in Roman’s room. We carried ladders up and positioned them as well as we could. Hope helped us stabilize everything while we hoisted the sheets up one at a time with Drew all the way in the attic and me perching at the top of the ladder to push the end of the sheet up.
Everything went smoothly until the final sheet, which wedged against a crossbeam on a rafter and wouldn’t budge. We would have just left it for another day, but it had Drew blocked in the attic space unless he slithered around the side on his hands and knees. The blown-cellulose insulation was easier on skin than the fiberglass kind, but we both decided we might as well just finish the job for good. “Hold on,” I told him, “I’ll climb up and help from up there. I can get more leverage.”