Rise: How a House Built a Family(44)

Drew snatched him by the arm, and then to take the sting out of it, propped him up on his shoulders. “Whoa! Look how tall you are!” he said.

“I a great, big, little, giant!” He lifted his arms high and roared.

“We need to build a safety fence around this slab,” Drew said, peering down over the eight-foot corner where Roman had teetered seconds ago. Broken blocks and shards of hardened mortar littered the ground.

“No time for temporary safety nets. Let’s build some walls. Until then, we’ll keep taking shifts watching Roman. Jada has the first shift today.” I spread a copy of our pencil-drawn plans on the floor of our future laundry room. Drew and Hope knelt next to me while Jada and Roman ran off the slab to hunt for tadpoles in the puddles.

“Where do we start?” Hope asked.

I wiped a hand over my face. I had no idea where to start. “The library,” I answered, as though it were the gospel truth. “The south wall is a wet wall, so we know exactly where to put it.” That was true at least. The big white pipes to carry wastewater down from the upstairs had to be sandwiched inside a wall. We walked back to that side of the house. Drew and Hope were wearing their tool belts, and I strapped mine on while we all stared down at the sewer line poking up through the slab.

“I’ve got the tape measure.” Drew shook the hundred-foot reel tape at me.

“Who has the chalk line?” I asked.

“Jada!” Hope yelled. “We need the chalk line!”

Jada looked down at her feet and ran through the mud field to the back corner of the property, Roman trailing after her with an empty pail and muddy net. Her tongue stuck out a little while she worked the knot tying the chalk line around a fat hickory tree. Even though I was sixty feet from it, I could see neon-orange rings around the tree from the ground up to her shoulder height where she had tied it. I hoped it hadn’t been hanging there as her limbo line through any rainstorms.

“Fourteen feet is what we planned.” I waved Drew to the corner. “Measure out and see how close we are with the pipe.” I made pencil marks at three points and was pleased that we were almost exactly on the mark with our plans. But we hadn’t really understood how large the pipes would be when we drew the plans, so we would be two inches off on the other side. The wet wall had to be constructed with two-by-sixes instead of two-by-fours, to allow room for the four-inch sewer line coming down from the toilet.

“No more playing with the tools, Jada. They aren’t toys!” Hope snatched the chalk line and picked stray bits of dirt and bark away before winding it up.

“Ask me before you play with a tool. And even if I give you permission, they have to be back in the shop before we leave the site.”

Jada nodded, still looking at her feet.

“You can use my tools.” Roman offered his mud-crusted net with a grin.

“If you and Roman gather sticks and sweetgum balls, I’ll make a fire later,” I said, knowing it would be just the thing to cheer her up.

They ran off, swerving for maximum puddle exposure. Less than an hour on site and their jeans were already splattered with red mud from ankle to butt.

Hope wound the chalk line in and shook the case to recoat the string with fresh chalk powder. We stretched the line and popped marks for the library walls, carefully leaving spaces for the French doors. Then we went back to the laundry room and marked it out. That pipe was off by about three inches. Still not the end of the world as far as amateur builds went.

I felt powerful, moving whole walls this way and that like giant chess pieces. The kids were getting into it, too, really feeling the house as a three-dimensional space for the first time. By the time Jada and Roman asked for lunch, all the downstairs walls were marked. It had taken longer than I expected, but I was a firm believer in measuring ten times and building once—or twice.

Drew built a fire in the rock ring and we sat around it with our sandwiches, each staring into the blaze and chewing in the same slow rhythm of the licking flames. I looked down and found my plate empty except for a piece of crust. I clicked my tongue and tossed it to Hershey. She caught it and turned her eyes on Jada, the most likely source of dropped food.

Roman was sagging in his mini lawn chair, sandwich gone and eyes closed.

I carried him to his pallet in the shop. Hershey looked forlorn to leave the food, but she followed and settled next to Roman to keep guard. I sat on a can of concrete sealer and closed my eyes. I just needed one second. The bucket tipped a little and a realized I had dozed off and almost fallen over.

Drew stood in the doorway. “Can we build a wall?” he asked.

I knew how he felt; I was anxious, too. “We have to mark the windows and exterior doors. Then we can try a wall.”

“Sounds easy,” he said, as though we hadn’t already learned that none of this was as easy as it looked on paper.

We marked windows first, measuring a half dozen times, and then starting again. The interior wall placement had some leeway, but windows would be seen from the outside by other people. They had to be perfect. And since I hadn’t even ordered them yet, I wasn’t exactly sure what size the rough frame should be. We worked our way around the house and then added the doors and window to the garage, except the overhead garage doors, which would take a few more phone calls to figure out.

The number of decisions I had to make on the spot that day frightened me. There were no other adults to ask, Does that sound right? What do you think? It was all on me, and I was starting to feel the weight of it. It didn’t take a genius or a licensed contractor to know that the decision overload would snowball over the next few months.