Rise: How a House Built a Family(30)
Without even considering that my focus would call him up, I pulled the covers to my chin and slipped directly into my meditation world instead of sleep. The light was there, warm and inviting enough that I forgot I was afraid to enter. Caroline didn’t show herself, invisible as always, but Benjamin was there, cross-legged and looking deep into my eyes. I didn’t want to be afraid of him, I wanted to get him talking. So I did the only thing I could think of, a move my grandpa had taught me many years ago: I took away my enemy’s bargaining chip. No one could make me feel paralyzed or manipulated by secrets if I didn’t have any. I opened my mind and welcomed him without restriction.
Go ahead, I told him. Weigh the good and bad of me.
Once he knew every little corner, I could move on from that dreadful place. If he didn’t like what he saw, then he could move on, too. He was part of my own mind, a creation of my subconscious, which had to mean I could boot him right out if I wanted to. As soon as I thought it, I knew it wasn’t true. I did not create Benjamin, he simply was, and I had no more power to boot him out than to make him speak.
Chin a notch too high and avoiding eye contact, I must have looked like a defiant teenager. This is me, damn it. This is who I am and what I’ve done. Take it or leave it.
Benjamin didn’t move, just watched me with his slow-motion blink the only proof he wasn’t a statue. His lip didn’t snarl in disgust, and his eyebrows remained smooth, relaxed. The furrows on his brow were from age and smiles, not disapproval. I had the sense that he was not only watching me, but watching out for me, and then I slept. There were no nightmares and no lectures from Caroline, and I now understood that those were two different things.
Roman and Jada were playing upstairs when I woke. The sun was up, but it was a cloudy, gray winter day, the sort made for sleeping in and watching movies with repeated rounds of hot tea, hot coffee, and hot cocoa. Not for us, of course, but for other people. For people who left house building to the experts.
I made coffee, smiling over how necessary the dark brew had become. I’d never been a coffee drinker, only taking small sips on occasion, and then only when it was more cream than brew. While I wasn’t exactly drinking it black these days, I was certainly turning more mainstream, with a touch of cream and barely any sugar. Jada and Roman slid down the stairs on their butts, fuzzy pajama bottoms turning the ride slick. Still, it looked more painful than any spanking they’d ever had from me.
“Pie! I want apple pies and roast beast!” Roman shouted, right hand raised as though he had triumphantly slain the beast himself.
“That’s exactly what Christmas pie is for,” I said, cutting a slice of apple for myself. “For breakfast.” I had always started baking the desserts early so they were spread out over the entire holiday break. “You’ll have to wait until Santa comes to eat the roast beast though.”
Hope joined us, making a plate of beef-and-bean burritos for breakfast. Jada had cereal, dropping a couple of fresh cranberries in the milk in place of strawberries. We all laughed at her puckered face when she bit into the first one, and then harder when she stubbornly bit the second. All berries are not created equal, dear child.
I glanced at Drew’s door at the top of the stairs, wishing he would join us but knowing he would more likely wait until the kitchen was empty before he poured himself a mug of coffee, blacker and more manly than my own, and carried it back upstairs to drink in front of his computer.
Hershey and I did a quick search of the front and back porch, looking for signs of anything out of place. Then I spread out the plans for the workshop on the table and erased the window. Every window I’d ever seen in a shop was covered over with stacks of lumber or shelves of nails. We would have electricity out there for overhead lights, and in order to get the riding lawn mower in I’d put a garage door at one end to let in plenty of sunlight. Besides, I was nervous about framing windows and doors. One less would make everything easier. The lumber was already on site, wrapped in plastic ribbons like an enormous gift. Building the shop would be perfect practice, like framing a mini house.
Drew finally came down for a cup of coffee and stood over my shoulder with it, looking at the plans we’d drawn on the back of Jada’s math homework.
“Want to try out that nail gun today?” I asked, expecting him to resist.
“Sure. What time?” he asked, standing taller.
“Let’s get dressed and go. Nothing else to do around here today.”
The kids dressed in construction clothes and old coats faster than I’d ever seen them get ready for school. I wondered if they would be so anxious to pick up a hammer a month from now, or six months. The novelty would wear off for all of us, but hopefully our determination would not. If they gave up, I couldn’t finish on my own. No plan B. No way out.
The city wouldn’t let me put in my own temporary electrical pole, which was probably a good call on their part. So I called an electrician who promised to do it cheap if I picked up the parts and had everything waiting for him. I’d done my part, even securing the box to the pole and using a post-hole digger to put it in place—a job I’d rather not repeat anytime soon, in the red clay with more quartz rock per square inch than there were chips in Hope’s overloaded chocolate chip cookies. Weeks later, the electrician had delayed a dozen times, and we were left with no power to run our tools or lights.
A generous neighbor, Timothy, had offered to let us run an extension cord down the hill, past his pond, and to his pump house to run any tools we needed until the pole was hooked up. Timothy was tall and lanky, a Yankee transplant who embraced Southern living so fully that he planted okra and black-eyed peas in his garden and even had a pseudo-Southern twang that made me smile for its precision and proper grammar. I had had no intention of taking him up on his kind offer, but on that cold December morning it’s exactly what we did. I plugged in the tiny air compressor I’d bought at a discount hardware store and fired it up. Drew hooked up the nail gun, eyes alight. I pretended to defer to him because he was the one who had read the instruction manual, but I was secretly as terrified of the wicked-looking gun as he was delighted. To him and every other fifteen-year-old boy on the planet, it looked more like a zombie-killing machine from a video game than it looked like hard work.