Rise: How a House Built a Family(66)

We all marveled at how fast they worked, tossing armloads of bricks up to a worker on the scaffolding who caught them with a scoop of his tan arms, piled them up, and reached down for the next armload flying his way.

While they worked on the front, Dad started us on the siding behind the house and then he built a chimney around the triple-wall pipe for my woodstove. The siding made Jada and Drew happy. It was fast progress with a beautiful finished product. Everything we had done until that point was part of the interior skeleton of the house. The brick and siding were finish work. We pretended it meant we were almost done.

By the time we got most of the siding finished and all the brick was up, Dad had almost reached the end of his medicine supply. Because of the complex delivery schedule of the refrigerated interferon he needed for his MS, he had planned to leave when it ran out rather than change the shipping address.

I felt a little panicked at the thought of making decisions on my own again. Even if I would probably come to the same conclusions, I found a lot of comfort in tossing around the possibilities and hearing someone else say my thinking was sound, even another amateur. Dad no doubt felt my panic and doubled up his workload, staying at the job site all day while I was at work and the kids were at school and then continuing with us past sunset.

I shouldn’t have been surprised when, only two days before he planned to leave, Jada ran into the house to get me. “Grampa fell. He’s hurt.” Her eyes had teared over and her fingertips pressed so hard on her bottom lip that it faded to a bloodless white.

He had been on the damn ladder again, putting the last of the siding on the chimney out back. I never got a clear answer about how far he fell or what he hit. He had made it to a lawn chair that was tilted crooked on a lump of concrete and he was holding his arm, already swollen and ugly enough that I wanted to take him directly to the emergency room.

“Now just wait awhile,” he said. “I felt around. Nothing’s broken.”

He was trembling and his voice was quiet and high-pitched.

“We have to get your arm X-rayed. It could have a fracture, you can’t feel that by poking around.”

“Oh, my arm?” He laughed a little, but it was eerie instead of funny. “My arm is nothing. It’s my back I hurt.”

When he had caught his breath I checked out his back and found a knob the size of half a tennis ball next to his spine. I had never seen anything like it and couldn’t even imagine what it was. But I knew what it cost. And the price was too high for a house.

The kids and I pleaded and insisted. I even threatened to call an ambulance, which only prompted him to prove he could walk to the car on his own two feet. Maybe I forgot to mention it, but my dad is stubborn. Glad I didn’t inherit that annoying trait.

He took three extra-strength Tylenol and went to bed as soon as we got home. Then he rested another day and we packed him up for the drive home. He still insisted that he wanted to see his own doctor, because that would be easier for insurance. I still insisted that he needed an X-ray and probably an MRI of both his arm and his back. The sixteen-hour drive north was never pleasant, but this time it would be a special slice of hell.

I told him I loved him, thanked him for all the hard work, and then cried like a baby when he drove away with turkey sandwiches and sliced cheddar packed in a cooler next to him.

He called when he made it home and never told me what all the doctor said about the fall. I was glad that he went, at least, and trusted him to follow through while I picked up the pace on the build. Even with the boost of his help we were still impossibly behind schedule.

The kids and I spent a couple more long days cleaning up around the site. Brick and siding pieces had become a tripping hazard, and I wasn’t going to stand for any more injuries.

We hauled everything to the dump after dark and ate a quiet supper that did not include either turkey or cheese. We’d had enough of both to take a very long break.

I felt tired all the way through. My back was protesting from another day of bending and lifting after it had finally mended from the last strain. I took a Tylenol and climbed into bed. I didn’t go looking for Benjamin, and per usual, he respected my wishes. Sometimes I wanted his peace, no matter the cost, and other times it felt too fake to wrap around my shoulders, like a fairy-tale land that only I had access to. It didn’t feel fair. I wanted peace in the real world, the world I shared with my kids. They deserved to travel forward without the weight we carried. And if they couldn’t have it with me, then I didn’t want it at all.

Benjamin was stubborn, but in a different way from me or Dad. He didn’t argue with me. He had more effective ways to pull me in, and he was patient.

We stayed off the job site for a couple of days so I could catch up on work, or that’s what I told myself. The truth was that I was physically and emotionally exhausted. And maybe I was once again afraid to move forward.

On Wednesday night, we all went to Inkwell to mark the electrical. I had no idea how our pot-smoking electricians could possibly wire the place without electrocuting themselves, but I had already paid them the required 50 percent deposit, and that was over five grand. Like too many things in my life, there was no turning back, no way out.

We walked through the house together to make sure we didn’t miss anything. Each of the big kids was armed with a different color of spray paint. Drew had yellow to mark ceiling light fixtures. Hope had red to mark double light switches for fan-and-light combos and green for single-light fixtures. Combos of more switches received a red-green “X.” Jada had white for outlets. It was her first time using spray paint, and she was wearing the giddy smile of a graffiti artist in front of a clean train. Each of them was also armed with a scrap of cardboard to prevent paint from dripping onto the floor. Or at least that was the plan. I followed with a clipboard, checking off which lights I’d already purchased and which were still needed.