Rise: How a House Built a Family(19)
At sunset on Tuesday, a flood of texts came in from Drew while Roman and I were half lost and scanning ditches for realtor signs.
Drawing house plans? Drew asked. Where’s the oversize paper? Drafting ruler? Mechanical pencil? Where are you?
“Time to go home,” I told Roman, who had fallen into a sleepy trance. I stopped on the narrow side street I had wandered down and started a three-point turn that doubled to a six-point turn. When I shifted back into drive the final time, I spotted a handmade sign on a tree. Sloppy cursive writing announced one acre, with a barely legible phone number at the bottom. The acre looked like a park, with beautiful hardwoods trimmed high. It was on a hill with a pond on one side and a dense forest behind it. I pulled the passenger-side tires into the grass and got out, half expecting something terrible to appear—another snake den, skunks, vampires. But the land couldn’t be more perfect.
I let Roman climb out, and I called the number while we hiked through the tall grass. “The number you have reached is not in service. Please check—” I redialed, changing the uncertain 0 into an 8.
“We just posted the sign this afternoon,” a woman said, her Southern accent strong enough for a country song. “My daddy gave me that land when I turned eighteen, even though I said I wouldn’t never live next to him. That was thirty years ago now. I decided on a whim to sell.”
I made an offer on the acre over the phone. It was ten thousand less than they were asking but still ten thousand more than I had. Less than an hour later, we signed a basic, handwritten agreement on the hood of my car. When I flipped the paper over at a stop sign, I discovered that it was their receipt for four new truck tires and an alignment at Tire Town. I giggled until a few tears flowed. The entire thing was absurd. Maybe I really had traveled through Drew’s portal to an alternate reality. I wasn’t the sort of girl to buy an acre of land on a tire receipt. Roman laughed with me from the backseat, and I wiped away the tears, sobering. Today, I was exactly that sort of girl. The spontaneous girl in the rearview mirror was me after all.
Drew and I sketched preliminary plans at the dining-room table on giant sheets of paper, glancing over at the stick model for inspiration when things got tedious. We kept our pencils sharp and our lines straight, working into the early-morning hours to make sure the staircase width met code and the landing had enough room to swing around a king-size mattress. Roman slipped by in stealth mode, stealing our erasers and hiding under the table to gnaw on them like a teething puppy. The tenth time I pulled a fat pink eraser from his slobbery fist, I lifted him up to see the stick house. “This is what we’re drawing. We’re going to build a big house like this. One we can live in.”
“Yup,” he said, nodding his head until his eyes jiggled. His feet were running before they hit the floor. He skidded into my mostly empty office, where Hope and Jada were googling energy-efficient building ideas from the PC propped on my great-grandmother’s trunk. When they came up with something good, they shouted it out for us to incorporate. I could have moved the computer to the table, but the chaos of their conversations swinging from excitement to bickering and insults would have driven Drew and me nuts while we struggled to play amateur architect.
We had already named the imagined house Inkwell Manor. It would be the place where my dream of writing for a living came true. I stared down at the model house, imagining Roman crawling up the staircase. A tiny bag of colorful beads hung at the top of the stairs. One of the girls must have added it, but I had no idea why. Another bead bag hung over Hope’s bedroom door, and one over the back door. It was a bizarre way to decorate. Then I spotted a series of sharp screws sticking through a wall in the garage and more by the front door. A mini skateboard blocked the dining-room door. “What on earth?” I mumbled, pricking my index finger against one of the screws.
Drew looked up, wearing a half smile that made him look all grown up. “You found the improvements. What do you think?”
“What are…” Then I saw the slivered edge of a CD along the back door and knew immediately what they had done. “Booby traps.”
“Home Alone–style. Jada did the beads. Hope came up with some ideas that were seriously scary.” He shook his head, but didn’t lose the smile. “It’s what you get, raising kids around your mystery novels.”
“Are these cameras?” I pointed to the acorn hats on every corner of the house’s exterior, and he nodded. Wouldn’t it be nice if they really had made the modifications because I was a mystery writer? Wouldn’t it be nice if imagination were the only thing they had to be afraid of?
I sat back down and sketched as quickly as I could. It was long past time to get out of this house.
On Friday morning I took the plans to a copy shop, painfully aware that even after I had the printer darken the ink they looked like exactly what they were, pencil-drawn renderings done by amateurs. I took them to my bank, shoulders back and confident that my great credit would put me on the fast track to borrow everything I needed. The balding loan officer whose heavy glasses slid to the tip of his nose twice a minute declined my request, and not without a smirk. “We only loan to licensed contractors. Experienced contractors.” Down and back up went the glasses. “I can recommend a couple, hon. They’ll take good care of you.”
I tried two more banks, feeling so defeated at the last that my request sounded more like a squeaky apology. We could do this. I knew it with everything in me. But of course we couldn’t do it without the money to buy supplies. And if the bank made us hire a contractor to oversee the work, we couldn’t afford to do it at all.