Rise: How a House Built a Family(21)
He shook his head, leaning back over the papers and flipping through too fast to be doing anything more than a magician’s trick of distracting me while the number ticker in his head weighed the risk of taking me on.
I dropped a mint on my tongue even though I hadn’t wanted one and was afraid I would either choke on it or start drooling when the menthol hit my sinuses. He held up one of the papers and turned sideways to his computer. I smiled a bit, probably a mirror of the loan-officer smirk, when he slipped a pair of wire reading glasses on his nose before typing in a few numbers. He had barely been able to see my papers, let alone evaluate them with any real accounting math. He was as fake as my pearls.
“No accounts with us?” he asked, looking at the computer screen instead of me.
“This will be my first.”
He scrolled a few pages, probably reading them, or at least the important parts. I was fairly certain it was my credit score he was looking at, and thankfully it was in remarkably good shape. I’d never liked debt and paid everything off in record time. But more than one man in my past had gone on spending sprees that gave me plenty to pay off.
“And you’ll be able to do this immediately? By Wednesday?” I repeated, hoping he was distracted enough not to notice that my confidence, which had been unprecedentedly high to this point, was waning. My voice hadn’t squeaked, but it had been a touch too high, too plaintive. I pushed my shoulders back and dropped my chin, willing my voice to drop, too. “I’ll finish the foundation work before Christmas. Ice makes everything more complicated.”
He sat back, his chair spinning slowly back toward me, seemingly on its own. His eyes focused on the edge of his desk, which I could see had been nicked, probably by the arms of this chair. Little imperfections like that would irritate a perfectionist, an accountant. As the silence stretched between us, the wall clock above his desk seemed to grow louder. The second hand jerked unsteadily through the uphill side of each minute with two steps forward and one step back.
An image of him jumping up and throwing his computer monitor across the room made me wince. That was the last straw! I imagined him yelling, his glasses dropping to the floor and his hands coming for my throat. What were you thinking? You are too weak for this, Cara! But his hands were actually steepled at his chin, another thing they must teach in business school, the contemplative pose, similar to Rodin’s Thinker but with interlaced fingers to symbolize unity. We’re in this together.
“I think,” he said, slow and deliberate, bouncing his finger steeple off his chin. “I think we’re going to be able to get this to you.”
“By Wednesday?” I asked, fully aware I was pushing my luck.
He stood, and stuck out his hand. Somehow I managed to prop myself on my own shaky legs to return his firm handshake while his closemouthed smile signaled that we were now partners but would never be friends. “By Thursday,” he said, letting me know that no matter how I’d entered the building, I did not own it after all. “Sit tight. I’ll get your paperwork.”
I walked out the front door, chin high, and with a construction loan for nearly a third more than I’d asked for. Sweat dripped between my shoulder blades and down the back of my knees in endless rivers.
“We did it! We have the money for everything we need and then some!” I shouted the minute the kids walked through the door. I had already told Roman, but the only part of celebrating he was interested in was the part that came with dessert.
The older kids were happy, but I detected a tiny bit of hesitation. We were celebrating our own enslavement. This project would chain us to a job site, and the work wasn’t going to be easy.
“It’s going to be a busy year!” Drew rubbed his hands together.
I shrugged, narrowing my eyes. “Actually, a busy nine months. Turns out a standard construction loan is not a full year.”
“Nine months, then,” Drew said, his eyebrows lifting under a couple of stray curls. The kids would be in school all day and I would have to keep my freelance jobs to pay the bills, which meant I’d be working full-time as a programmer and writing three to four hours a day. Nine months was possible … for an experienced crew. But for four kids and a woman who had struggled for more than an hour to get the light covers off the fluorescents in the garage last week, nine months was a heck of a stretch.
I closed my eyes and saw the tall glass of lemonade with the red and white paper straw, the last straw. It didn’t scare me like it used to.
I licked my lips and went to the pantry for a jug of lemonade. “It’s Cancún night!” I announced, the way I always did when we were having Mexican food. Once upon a time, Adam and I had spent a lot of time scuba diving, and Cancún had been a favorite spot.
“Everybody chops!” Hope said, waving her siblings toward cutting boards. Together, we made an enormous fajita dinner, talking and laughing with salsa music turned up loud. I couldn’t help wondering if it was a last-meal celebration. We wouldn’t have much time for hot meals in the next nine months. The three oldest did homework while I did cleanup, and then we herded into the car to drive the seven miles to our land, which was now officially our job site.
I’d brought four stakes—actually two old broom handles cut in half—a ball of neon-pink string, and a hundred-foot tape measure. The sun was setting but we could see well enough to pick the general location of the house on the upper section of our sloping acre. We pushed the stakes into the soggy earth with as much pride as Neil Armstrong claiming the moon. I had the distant thought that survey equipment was probably supposed to be brought in at this stage to align the front of the house with the road, some three hundred feet in front of it.