Rise: How a House Built a Family(64)

The stomach flu lasted for just over twenty-four hours, leaving us weak and pitiful. Dad avoided us all and by some miracle never caught it. My stomach hurt almost bad enough for me to forget how bad my back hurt. Drew was the only one unaffected, and he hid out in his room to avoid our germs. It was nice to hear rapid-fire automatic weapons echoing in his room again. It had been too long since he had time to get lost in a video game.

I thought about how I had been escaping with Benjamin and realized we each had our refuge. Jada had her dolls and toys, and Hope found peace in her craft or scrapbooking projects. I forgave Benjamin a little for leaving my kids out. Maybe they each had their own Benjamin after all.

It had rained through both nights of our sickness and most of the day on Friday. We were up bright and early on Saturday morning, even if we weren’t bushy-tailed. We arrived at Inkwell ready to do some serious work on the ceiling so we could start the rafters, which I had a number of misgivings about building—but first things first.

Drew carried the compressor and nail gun up and I followed with nails, various tools, and supplies. “Oh, crap,” he said, sounding a lot like Hope had downstairs when she saw how much water had pooled across the slab again.

“This sucks,” he continued. “I mean, this really, really sucks.”

I looked up and saw that it was worse than a few puddles. The ceiling joists we’d moved up on Wednesday had soaked up enough water to make them heavy and pliable. The weight had bent them down until they were shaped like mocking smiles rather than the rail-straight boards we needed. Maybe if we had balanced them up on end instead of laying them flat. Maybe … But there was no time for maybes. They had already dried in the morning sun. “Do you think if we flip them over?” I asked, knowing right away that it wouldn’t work.

“We’ll have to order new boards,” Drew said. “Throw these away. They’re ruined.”

We didn’t have the money to buy double supplies. And these were expensive pieces of lumber. One long board cost a lot more than two shorter boards that would add up to the same length, because they had to be cut from taller trees, which made them more difficult to make and to transport. “No way. We’ll make these work. Just give me a minute.”

He climbed up, shaking his head and flipping the boards up to balance on the short ends the way they were supposed to be.

“Let’s get the first one nailed in, then we’ll figure out the next. One at a time. We can make this work somehow. Maybe if I cut spacers to hold them the right distance apart?”

Dad made two spacers, which Drew nailed in place to hold the next joist exactly sixteen inches from the center of the first. We nailed it in place and it stayed straight, counteracting the bend in the warped board, so we did it again. It added a lot of time to the job, and it took a little more wood than we would have otherwise used, but we put spacers between every ceiling joist down the back half of the house over the rest of that day and all of the next. A job made at least four times longer than it should have been by our own stupidity. Live and learn.

The next week brought a line of thunderstorms that crippled the entire Midwest. Thankfully, our ceiling joists were safely in place and shouldn’t suffer much from the exposure. The subfloor upstairs was another story. We had already purchased cherry hardwood flooring and were worried that the plywood would be too damaged to make a stable surface for it.

I finally reached out to Pete and admitted that I was too terrified to watch my kids crawl around on the upstairs ceiling joists—twenty feet off the ground in some places—to stick-build the rafters ourselves. He was sympathetic and suggested he could bring Re-Pete and another guy over on the weekend to get the roof on. I was so thrilled that I forgot I wasn’t supposed to believe everything Pete said.

A tornado passed less than a mile from Inkwell Manor that week, peeling back roofs and tossing mobile homes around like Twinkies. “God hates trailer parks and Oklahoma,” my dad said. The familiarity of his much-repeated line made me smile.

When we arrived on site Saturday morning, I was surprised that Pete hadn’t beat us there. Drew wasn’t, but he had been uncharacteristically sluggish and in a foul mood. I was even surprised at lunch when Pete still had not arrived. We stayed busy putting up Sheetrock nailers and sweeping away water puddles, but it was still irritating. I had a whole roof not being built.

By the time Pete called at four in the afternoon, I wasn’t surprised anymore. Fool me once … okay so we were way past once.

“We got a call about some tornado roofs that needed fixing so we’re working on that today,” Pete said. “These houses are going to be damaged if we don’t put the roofs back on.”

So is mine! I wanted to scream. But it wasn’t Pete’s fault that I was a scaredy-cat. I should have ordered prebuilt rafters the way I had the ceiling joists between the two floors. Structurally either version would offer the same support, but it was much cheaper to stick-build them from scratch—at least, it would have been if I hadn’t lost my nerve. Since we had already built the rafters for the shop, it hadn’t seemed like it was a big deal. But stick-building on the ground level for a thirteen-foot-wide building is a lot different from stick-building in place for a thirty-three-foot-wide house from twenty feet in the air.

“We’ll come by in the morning and get started on yours,” Pete said, but I was pretty sure he was just saying what I wanted to hear, not what he intended to do. And as much as I hated to be, I was right.