I abandoned the kids to the stain and paint while I started the tile work in the bathrooms. My bathroom had several diagonal walls and the counter was set diagonally, which made for a nightmare of trips up and down the stairs for wet-saw cuts. My five-by-five shower also had to be tiled from floor to ceiling. In our spare time we built the frames for concrete countertops, which proved to be a lot more difficult than it had looked on YouTube. My mom spent an entire weekend perfecting the frames so that they could be easily removed after the pour. She sealed every seam with caulk and bright red duct tape. Without her extreme attention to detail, half of my frames would have been permanently embedded in the countertops.
All the finish work was slow and took ten times longer than we expected, but nothing was worse than the wood floors upstairs. We had been working on them for over a month. Around two thousand square feet of hardwood flooring had to be laid through the bedrooms and closets, all in two-inch-wide strips. Some days, sixteen hours of spreading glue and hammering the tongue-and-groove pieces together with a rubber mallet moved us only a couple of feet across the expanse of the house. Roman was given the job of pushing the long, emptied flooring boxes out my bedroom window, which was open only eight inches so he couldn’t tumble out with them. “Look out below!” he yelled, sliding each box out and giggling when it sailed down to the growing heap.
By the end of August, it was looking like a real home. It was nowhere near finished, but we could definitely see a light at the end of our very long, dark tunnel.
The electricians had installed half a dozen lights and then vanished. They had had a falling-out and refused to come to the house at the same time, which reduced their sloth-like pace by half or more. We were anxious to have outlets and working lights so that we could ditch the long extension cords out to the temp pole for our tools and spotlights. I knew how to install them myself, but not only was that against code, it would take up valuable time already allocated for the impossibly long finish list. Besides, our contract affording them ten grand to complete the task made me hesitant to take on the responsibility, even though time was running short for our electrical inspections.
When Tweedledee and Tweedledum finally had enough fixtures and switches in place to run tests, we discovered that all our fears were on target. They really had been too high to get things right. They had lost the wires for my undercabinet lights behind the Sheetrock and never found them. The expensive speakers I bought to go over the den sofa suffered the same fate, useless with the wires somewhere in a twenty-foot wall packed with six inches of blown-cellulose insulation. Neither of the professionals had a clue where to start searching. The exterior outlets popped a fuse every time we tried to use them, and only a single phone line worked in the entire house, even though every room had at least one wired phone jack.
I called them continuously to come back and fix things, but their idea of fixing things was to smoke a little while they thought things over. They couldn’t get my cameras or the flat-screen monitor by the front door to work, but eventually sent a friend over to read the instruction manual.
Despite our frustration over the things outside our control, we kept reasonably upbeat about each new task. It still seemed impossible to finish for the bank inspection and the final city inspection to get our certificate of occupancy, especially after the kids had started back with school and homework, which stole away our working hours.
It was possible to get an extension from the bank, but it could result in extra fees and interest that I couldn’t afford. And, more important, we couldn’t handle another month or another week of building. Nine months of working nineteen-hour days had sapped every last ounce of our physical and emotional strength. The deadline was a countdown to the end of an impossibly difficult job as much as it was a ticking time bomb.
At five o’clock on the first Friday of September, with only a week left to go, I came back to the house we lived in too exhausted to speak. The kids had taken a couple of hours off after school to do homework, and I had come back to get them. But once I got there I didn’t think I could muster the energy to drive back to Inkwell, let alone accomplish anything.
I had been sleeping between eight and ten hours a week for three weeks, with an occasional twenty-minute catnap on a pallet in Hope’s closet at Inkwell. Even working those hours, it seemed impossible. We hadn’t poured our concrete countertops yet, let alone finished them. And until that was done, we couldn’t install sinks, faucets, or the stove top. Those tasks alone added up to more than a week of work, but we still had to make railings for the front and back steps in order to pass code, and we had to install toilets and the final electrical fixtures. The stairs needed a final coat of polyurethane, and the concrete floors downstairs had to be coated with xylene. The outdoor faucets had to be installed, and so did the garage doors and the concrete slab.
“I’m going to lay down, just give me twenty minutes, I’ll set an alarm.” I wasn’t sure if I had spoken the words aloud or merely thought them. The mattress swallowed me up, pulling me down to the deepest sleep I’d known in months. Benjamin wasn’t there. I rarely thought about him or Caroline anymore. In some ways, I felt I had outgrown them. He had been there to bring me peace and she had shared strength, two things I felt like I had finally found within myself. The kids and I were no longer the strangers we’d been on those first days of piling concrete block and mixing mortar. We worked as a team, a well-oiled machine. We laughed and practically read one another’s minds. The magic we had all found in the tornado-damaged house, the inspiration that started with Caroline, had been reborn in Inkwell Manor.
“Just one more week,” I whispered, smiling my way into the dreamless catnap.
“A ghost out the window!” Roman screamed. Jada laughed and Hershey barked, her nails clicking across the floor. Another game of chase.
“Twenty minutes,” I mumbled. “Can’t I just have twenty minutes?” Without opening my eyes, I felt for my phone. Even after I found it and held it in front of my face, it took me another full minute to get my eyes open. Another scream, this time with both Jada and Roman crying, which set Hershey off barking and whining, all while I tried to work out the numbers on my phone screen. It was seven. Two hours? Why didn’t the kids wake me? I had an e-mail from the newspaper with another article request for the freelance job, but that had been sent at six in the morning.
I checked my clock again. It was seven in the morning. I had slept for fourteen hours. Two weeks’ worth of sleep at once. It’s a wonder I survived it.
I pushed to my elbows. Drew stood in my doorway, his silhouette so much larger than it had been before the build. “Ready to get some work done?” he asked.
“Why didn’t you wake me? We have so much to do. I can’t afford that much time off!” I was angry, but more than that I was scared that the last hope of meeting our deadline had just been stolen by the sandman.
Drew laughed. “We tried to wake you after twenty minutes. Then after an hour. We took turns trying every thirty minutes until eleven. You were practically unconscious. You needed it.”
I stood, stretched, and smiled. Aches that I was half expecting to feel for the rest of my life were gone. “I’m starving.”