Rise: How a House Built a Family(24)
Tell me I’m going to be okay. Tell me we’ll make it. Tell me something I can believe in. But his dark eyes took in every minuscule detail of my soul without giving me anything back. The strange man simply existed, nothing more. Then Hershey barked and the front door swung in to bounce hard against the doorstop. The bright little world vanished.
I felt calmer, more in charge, like I was able to take a full breath for the first time in years. But I was also a little afraid of the old man. Who was he? And what if I didn’t like what he was there to tell me? I bit my bottom lip. Life had tossed me some hard deals; whatever the old man had to say, I could take it. I promised myself I’d try it again, maybe every day, until I really did find my true self and understood the island man’s presence.
The kids announced homework and school drama. A teacher had been put on leave for an investigation, a janitor had helped a special-needs kid after a bad fall, and one of Jada’s friends was going out with the boy Jada had liked for two years. Hope and I made pork chops, potatoes, and corn on the cob, with Roman serving up plastic cakes and cookies on mini dishes while we worked. He wasn’t clingy after all, but slow and quiet without his afternoon nap.
After cleanup, Drew and I drove the seven miles to the job site while the girls did homework and took care of Roman. I had a concrete truck scheduled for the next morning to pour the footer, but the rebar had to be in place first. Instead of boots and hip waders, we had put our feet into tall bread bags and secured rubber bands around the ankles before putting on our running shoes. It kept the water a thin layer away from our skin, but not far enough to keep us warm.
Even in the South, December was cold. When we leaned over the edge of the trench to lop off roots, it was twenty-eight degrees and falling by the second. My feet were dead numb by the time we climbed down into the trench. Drew handed down ten-foot pieces of rebar, which is a half-inch steel rod used to reinforce concrete. I spaced the bars out in the trenches, hands so cold that the only thing saving my grip was the ribbed surface designed for a better concrete bond. We made four parallel lines of rebar all the way around the rectangle of the house and the smaller rectangle of the porch. The mini spring Jimmy pointed out had become a gusher. Drew affectionately named it the Ink Spill.
Our gloves did little more than hold a cold layer of ice water against our hands. Someone had probably invented a waterproof glove for this sort of work, but none of the videos we watched had mentioned it. I had never in my life imagined being so cold and miserable. Playing in four-foot snowbanks in a Wisconsin winter was warmer than being sopping wet in an Arkansas December. We used rocks to prop up the rebar, like Jimmy had suggested, but even they sunk in the mud slop faster than Gilligan in quicksand. Drew insisted the rebar chairs were exactly the thing we needed, so we ripped open the bag and propped a few in place. They looked like four-inch-tall traffic cones with a crescent support at the top to prop the rebar. In theory they were perfect, but their little heads vanished before we’d reached the end of the first trench.
After sunset, I turned on the headlights and we kept working with no noticeable progress. Somewhere along the way, we caught a case of the giggles. One of us mentioned that the Ink Spill could turn into the Ink Tsunami, and we imagined waves of water barreling through the trenches—which unfortunately wasn’t much of a stretch. Drew literally rolled around on a grassy spot, breath gone with laughter, while I sat next to him and smeared laughter tears with clay.
By then we had managed a system of placing flat rocks and then propping the rebar chairs on top of them. The rocks acted like miniature footers for the holders and the rebar was at least visible above the mud. “I’d say that’s a professional rebar job,” I said when I could speak again. My cheeks ached from smiling, and I loved the feel of happy tension. Our laughter needed to be pulled out and exercised more often.
“Think it will hold up Inkwell Manor?” he asked, then laughed even harder, gasping until I started to worry about him.
“What? What is it? More Ink Tsunami?” I was laughing, too, but without a target.
He shook his head. “It’s Sinkwell,” he managed between belly laughs. “Sinkwell Manor!”
“And it’s a wrap,” I said, peeling off my gloves and dragging mud-encrusted tools to the car. I twisted the key so the interior could heat while we packed up and put our shoes in shopping bags. We had flip-flops for the ride home.
We sat inside for a couple of minutes, the headlights shining on the trenches that had undergone another magical transformation, looking barely big enough for two rooms let alone a whole house. The heat sobered us while we worked through the painful sting of defrosting nerves and vessels. My nose tingled. I put the car in gear, and Drew turned on the dome light to search for his phone. I caught sight of my hands on the steering wheel and said, “Oh!”
Drew jumped and held his own hands up to the light. Like mine, they were a dead purple-gray from fingertip to wrist. We laughed most of the way home, now and then managing a word or two. “The gloves! The ink. Inkwell!”
We made it home before eleven, me hoping the ink would wash off and him hoping it wouldn’t. Hope gave us a thumbs-up when we lied and told her the work had gone perfectly. Jada and Roman were long asleep, both in my bed.
It was almost two weeks before the footing was poured. First an ice storm set us back, then the holidays, then an overbooked concrete company giving priority to contractors they knew. The delay gave us time to draw plans for a 450-square-foot workshop to store tools and supplies. It was obvious that hauling tools and supplies back and forth between houses was going to get more and more difficult. So we made a basic two-by-four frame with stakes pounded in to hold it straight—or what passed for straight in our amateur construction world. This way, when the concrete truck finally backed up our long drive it could pour both at once. At least that’s what I imagined.