Rise: How a House Built a Family(56)

I only hoped that the worst wasn’t yet to come.





–15–

Rise

One Cookie at a Time

Another round of rainstorms kept us away from the house, and I started to panic about the schedule. It was one of the rainiest seasons on record. The foundation had taken so long for us to figure out that we were months behind my original schedule. An experienced crew could have finished the block in a weekend for only a little more than I had paid Pete to help, and the saved time would have been worth ten times that. We had made progress, but I was making more bad decisions than I could afford.

Just when it seemed impossible to grab a stroke of positive luck, an angel showed up to pull us out of our muddy mess. He wasn’t the traditional white-plumed, singing kind; in fact, this man didn’t even believe in angels. But in our weary state, we welcomed the tall, stubborn German man who had raised me. He drove sixteen hours from Wisconsin by himself, his vehicle packed full with supplies and his head with ideas. I had more faith in my father’s ability and knowledge than anyone I knew.

“Grampa Puttkammer is here!” Roman shouted, nailing the pronunciation and enthusiasm even while he hid behind my legs.

But nothing in life is simple. My dad was facing a major health problem.

Not more than a year before, on one of those Sunday afternoons when my Bradford pear trees were turning from sweetly white to electric green, my strong, always-healthy father called me from Wisconsin. “It’s going to fall below freezing again tonight,” he said casually, as though May frost were as common to me as it was to the Yankees. “The windchill might hit five degrees and the cat won’t leave my lap. Did I tell you I ordered heirloom tomato seeds this year? And I guess they finally diagnosed that thing with my leg. Multiple sclerosis. It’ll be a dry summer again. We just haven’t had enough snow for the past few years…”

My scalp went tingly and my vision tunneled. This news was completely unexpected. Not the new garden seeds, the weather, or the lazy cat, but the relabeling of what I’d believed was a pinched nerve in his right leg. Dad had been taking care of my ailing grandparents for ten years, his own health ignored. “Multiple sclerosis, and snow,” I said, not sure what the fumbling words meant. But when you talk to a Wisconsinite, every conversation has something to do with snow or the Packers, and football just didn’t seem to fit. We talked medications and management, but with no cure and few successful treatments, there wasn’t much to say. Even the words “I love you, Dad” lost bulky weight, bubbling up fragile and wispy across my tongue.

He was still a few years from his planned retirement and one of the most brilliant and active people I’d ever known. I said these things over and over, as though his wit, energy, and proximity to free time should have wrapped him in a blanket of immunity. The sudden, undeniable truth of Dad’s mortality crushed the air from my lungs, and even when I stood in my backyard with my arms lifted to the sky, the world no longer seemed big enough for me to inhale fully.

I was toppled by the reversal of who would be taking care of whom. Even though I was eight hundred miles away, I wanted to drop everything and run to him, slipping and sliding up his frozen sidewalk. But I had my own messy life to deal with in Arkansas, so I hadn’t seen him as much as I needed to. And my messes just seemed to grow bigger and bigger. I didn’t expect more than phone advice from him when I started building, so seeing him at my kitchen table sketching ideas on the back of my junk mail was an enormous relief. He was six foot two, lanky, and still looked strong as ever.

“So exactly how much do you know about building a house?” Drew asked.

“Oh, quite a bit,” Dad said. “I built the house your mom grew up in. Course my dad helped. And all of his brothers. We had some friends who helped out quite a bit. And it was a lot smaller than the house you planned here. A third of the size, maybe. And it had a basement, so all the plumbing and vents ran down there, which made them easier to get to. Oh, and the roof structure was a lot different. Has to handle a hell of a snow load. But a house is a house. Nothing to it really.”

The kids and I exchanged nervous half smiles. It was too late to fool us with dismissive remarks about the simplicity of building a house. And we were all too aware that a work crew of a couple of teens, a 110-pound woman, and a grandpa with a chronic illness was nothing at all like having a huge family and pile of friends over for an old-fashioned barn raising. Maybe Dad knew that, too, or maybe he’s to blame for my congenital optimism.

“We’d better get my car unloaded,” Dad said. “Put it off long enough.”

“What did you bring?” Jada asked, hanging on his arm and bouncing on her toes.

“I came from Wisconsin, didn’t I? I brought enough cheese that we’re gonna need a wheelbarrow to carry it in!”

And he wasn’t kidding. If Dad had a motto it would include the words “bargain” and “bulk.” He had stopped at one of the Amish communities and bought a fifty-pound block of cheddar.

We spent the next couple of hours cutting it into blocks to bag and freeze. Fortunately, he had also picked up a half pallet of plastic bags intended for hot-dog buns. They were food-safe and perfect except for a smear on the printed logo that put them in a discount store. We had a lifetime supply of plastic and cheese.

We were binge-drinking slushies while we worked. “Whole flats of strawberries for a couple of dollars,” Dad bragged. “Just because they were going bad. Cleaned up and frozen they make perfect slushies. I added grapes to the mix, too, half a trash bag for a dollar. Just can’t let that go to waste. Think of all the work that went into growing those grapes and shipping them across the country. Might as well stick ’em in our head.”