Rise: How a House Built a Family(22)

“Should we measure from the street back to this spot?” I asked, stomping next to the first stake.

“Just eyeball it,” Drew said, and we did.

The rectangle of our neon-pink string looped around the broom stakes looked far too small to hold all the rooms we’d painstakingly designed, far too small to hold a life. I’d read that that would be the case, that during early phases the house would look too small and other times it would feel far too big. We had measured rooms and furniture, so I knew it wasn’t as small as it looked. I stood in the muddy corner where my library would sprout and looked out an imaginary window. “It’s perfect,” I said.

“It’s home,” Hope added.

Then Roman threw up his fajitas and we loaded back in the car, all marveling over how fast his fever had come on and hoping he could make the seven miles back to the house without any more reappearing fajitas or surprises.

The rest of the fajitas stayed down, but the surprises did not.

The week before Christmas had visions of power tools dancing in our heads. I found a guy with a backhoe to dig the footer, a process we had only seen on YouTube videos but felt like we understood fairly well. We did our best to square up the broom handles by running lines diagonally across the rectangle in a giant X. Theoretically, according to a fiftyish guy in Utah who went by geo39th, if the lines of the X were the same length, and each of our parallel edges were equal lengths, the house would be perfectly square. Since this seemed like an important starting point, we hoped he was right.

I showed up thirty minutes early the morning Jimmy and his backhoe had agreed to be there, but he had still beat me by another thirty. I shouldn’t have stopped for Christmas baking supplies.

“Wanted to beat the traffic,” Jimmy said, or something like it. His Southern accent was so dramatically skewed by the thick plug of tobacco under his gray lip that I had spent the first five minutes of our phone conversation trying to translate his words from Spanish before I realized he was speaking some form of English. I nodded. Any miscommunication could be blamed on tractor noise. He stared at me, a loan-officer smirk on his face. Nothing wrong with being early, but it surprised me that he hadn’t started digging. His tractor was burning fuel by the bathtub.

“Chalk?” he asked.

I shrugged, as lost as if he’d asked what I thought about dem Yanks or whatever sport was in season.

“Gotta mark it.”

“Yes.” I nudged a broomstick with my toe. How could he possibly miss my neon-pink string?

He raised his eyebrows, eyes shining with a gleam of amusement I was going to have to get used to seeing. “Bucket’ll tangle in yo pretty string.”

I’d bought the string at the lumberyard. They’d had orange and pink. I’d picked pink not because I was a girl, but because it looked especially visible and didn’t look like hunting gear. Okay, and maybe partly because I was a girl. At any rate, it was construction string and I thought we had used it the right way. This was how geo39th marked his Utah foundation. I’d watched him run his strings more than a dozen times. But I looked at the gaping teeth on the backhoe’s orange bucket and could see he was right. We had missed a step—apparently an important one. “Chalk?”

“Or top-side-down sprayin’ paint.”

“Chalk?” I asked again, imagining an extralarge chunk of Roman’s sidewalk chalk and trying for a visual of how that could possibly help me mark a footing.

“Comes in a bag.” He wiped thick, tanned fingers down his face and checked his watch.

“Bag of chalk. Hold on!” I ran to my car, sinking ankle-deep in a mud pocket along the way and carefully ignoring the cold goo seeping through my sock. Contractors don’t shake off the mud; they wear it like a badge. I opened my trunk and grabbed a five-pound bag of flour. It had turned out to be a good thing that Roman expected a dozen batches of cookies over the school break.

I straddled the line with my right foot in my future library and my left in the front yard, ripped the corner off the bag of flour, and walked backward, bent at the waist and leaving a powdery white line to outline the house. I had been moving fast, conscious that the clock was running on the backhoe, and didn’t look up at Jimmy until I reached my starting point. He gave a little salute while I pulled the string out of the way, dragging it across the yard with two of the stakes flopping along behind like fish on a stringer. I saluted back, feeling like one of the guys.

Jimmy carved perfect trenches into the earth, and the idea of our house merging deep past the surface sent a thrill through me. Digging deep was never easy, but it was always worthwhile. I wound my pink string into a ball. Everything would have to be used and reused for us to come in under budget. I leaned the stakes against a tree and carried the empty flour sack to the car. “‘Self-rising,’” I read from the label. “Don’t I wish.”

If wishes were fishes, we’d all cast nets, my grandma used to say. And wasn’t that the truth? I wasn’t much of a wisher anymore, though; I wasn’t watching the stars or pulling off flower petals while waiting for good things to find me. I was building them.

Jimmy pulled an old stump and an enormous root system out of the general area of our future refrigerator and loaded it on his trailer next to his backhoe. We exchanged a fair amount of dirt and flour with a vigorous handshake, and I wrote him a smudged check with only his first name because I hadn’t quite understood his last name despite the three occasions I’d asked him to repeat it.