Oblivious to the fungus and a few tiny spiders, Drew dumped his treasure bag onto the small kitchen table. We each took a chair, as orchestrated as though we did this every day of the week, and began stacking the sticks into a floor plan.
Roman sat at my feet with three inverted pots and a Tupperware bowl, whacking a rhythm with two thin sticks like he’d been born to thump skins in a garage band. Speaking of garages, my three-car stick addition was coming together nicely, but it wasn’t staying together. When anyone breathed wrong, or bumped the table with an elbow, the sticks shifted into an abstract art form. Drew bit his lower lip, inhaled dramatically, and then went back to carefully placing sticks, glaring like his willpower alone would keep them in place.
“Where’s the closest grocery? We should have Thanksgiving tomorrow,” Hope said from the refrigerator where she was pulling out cold cuts for supper.
“That’s right. Tomorrow is Thanksgiving. The whole trip was last-minute. I was just thinking sandwiches would be simple.” I felt bad. Tradition was important, especially when everything had gone so topsy-turvy. “I should’ve at least grabbed smoked turkey at the deli instead of maple ham.”
“Jada and I will do it,” Hope said, leveling a glare over my shoulder at Jada, making it clear that despite Jada’s lack of interest in planning or preparing Thanksgiving dinner, she was damn well going to do it.
I hid a smile. It would be good for the girls to do something together. As the oldest child and a junior in high school, Hope loved taking charge, which never went over well with free-spirited Jada. She was in the sixth grade and exercising her preteen rebellion whenever a task looked too much like work. “There’s a small market about five miles back. It won’t have a great selection, but I’ll bet you guys can come up with something. It’ll be fun.”
Hope and Jada disappeared up to the loft with a notebook and a pencil to plan our feast. If they made it back down without bloodshed, it would be a miracle.
“There’s a sewing kit out in the trunk,” I told Drew. “Think we could tie these corners together so we don’t have to build the same thing over and over again?”
He shrugged and went out with the car keys. When he didn’t come right back in, I decided not to go looking. I hadn’t worked out how to help my man-child through the anger and guilt of the past, let alone how to build a future. We were sitting side by side building a stick house together, like the three little pigs, and maybe right now that was enough.
I twirled my magic nail—that’s how I started thinking of it, like a magic bean that might sprout a house—between my fingers until Roman noticed and grunted at it.
“Mine,” he said.
“Yours,” I agreed, pulling a bait and switch with a cookie.
“Om-nom-nom.” He rocked sideways while he walked across the room like Godzilla taking Tokyo. “Cookie Monster. Om-nom-nom.”
Drew pushed through the door with the sewing kit under his arm and a fistful of two-foot-long sticks.
Roman ran at him, squealing. “Cookie Monster!”
Since Drew had been the one to make up the game, he gave chase, stomping and roaring while Roman giggled himself into a case of the hiccups.
I doodled a floor plan on a three-by-five notepad next to the phone. Drew flopped into his chair and stared at the plan before taking the pencil and pad to draw his version on the next page.
Hope and Jada stomped down the stairs, louder than a herd of elephants. No blood had been shed that I could see, but Jada’s nose was red and her eyes were puffy. I wanted to hug her, but she didn’t ask and I let her keep her dignity. “We won’t be gone long,” Hope said, grabbing the keys from the table and shaking a paper. “We have a list.”
No one could plan a meal or a party like Hope, but I worried about what would happen when she got to the miniature grocery store and found them lacking most of her essentials.
“Be flexible,” I told her, thumping my foot against Drew’s shin when he smirked. “It’s not a Kroger. It’s more for emergency camping supplies than holiday feasts.”
Drew tossed the drawing pad back to me. In his version, he’d labeled the bedrooms with our initials and wrote “Harry Potter Cupboard” next to the staircase, which made me smile. Even after everything he’d been through, he still believed in magic. I flipped to the next page, started with his basic plan, made a few changes, and Frisbeed it back to him. I’d added a room labeled “Future Library,” which could be a bedroom until a kid or two went to college.
He pursed his lips to one side, biting the inside of his cheek, a habit I’d tried to break him of since his first molars broke through. He nodded and released his cheek without me having to tap it and remind him. On the next page he sketched the front of the house, placing the windows and door so they would match up with what we had wordlessly agreed on for the interior.
It was nothing complex, just a two-story rectangle with the bedrooms upstairs and the den, kitchen, dining room, and library downstairs. I added shutters to the windows, labeled them “chocolate brown,” and sketched a porch with tall columns. Drew raised his eyebrows and nodded.
He took the pencil and added a shop. I added a tree house, so he put in a zip line and a rock wall. “Diamond Mine,” I wrote in a circle in the back lawn near the tree house. He added a portal to an alternate reality, but then flipped back to the interior drawing of the upstairs and penciled in toilets and showers while I rolled a ball to Roman.
What was I thinking? Giving these kids false hope, letting them plan for a future house that was as impossibly beyond our reach as the portal to another dimension. I pulled the nail out, twirling it between my fingers while Roman played basketball in a laundry basket. Then he climbed in and said, “I’m a boat. Whee!”
He jumped, knocking his boat over when the door flew open. He caught himself on his hands but whimpered anyhow. The blood rushed in my ears like a storm. Jada and Hope looked like pack mules, loaded down with shopping bags and pink-cheeked from the walk in the cold. But something was very wrong. Hope’s face was drawn and pale, and I could hear her breath rattling in and out from across the room. Drew stood up so fast his chair spilled over like Roman’s basket boat.
“Thump,” Roman said, whacking his palms against the worn wood floor. “Thump. Thump. Thump.”
Drew was behind Hope, locking the dead bolt and stringing the chain in place before I had made it to my feet.
“What?” I asked in a breathy whisper. “What happened?”
Hope cut her eyes at Jada. But I waved my hand. “We aren’t pretending anymore. We aren’t covering things up for anyone. We can say things that are true.” I wanted to mean it, to really, fully mean it, but I was still as afraid to speak some things aloud as I was to hear them.