Rise: How a House Built a Family(75)
The next morning, Hershey wanted out the front door instead of the back, which was more likely to signal bad news than good. Labradors rarely break their obsessive patrol paths without reason. The kids had started summer vacation—well, if you could call anything about our life a vacation—so I made a to-do list for them before I opened the front door a crack. The welcome mat was a clean series of black quatrefoil blocks on a cream background. No scary messages. No signs. No real reason for me to still be looking for these things. I pulled the door open and stepped out, one foot on the mat and one on the threshold.
The long, narrow porch had a small bamboo table and two matching chairs on the far end. It had been my birthday present three years ago, a little spot to read with a lemonade. A tall, iced lemonade with a red-and-white-striped straw. I closed the door, not only the cheery front door of the house, but the door that led to scary thoughts about things left on doorsteps and last straws. I was sick and tired of spending brain cells on the past.
I stumbled my way through an interview on my lunch hour at work. To bring in extra grocery money, I was freelancing for the state paper, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, writing front-page features for their inserts. Local human-interest stories were a nice diversion from the chaos of our own story, but I had a hard time being objective with story arcs just then, not to mention how hard it was to stay awake and meet my deadlines after working past dark on the job site and rising before the sun for my programming job. I cheated by listening to the most important part of the subject’s answers and then writing half the article during the interview when they carried on about less pertinent details.
We went to the job site in the afternoon and wished we could have gone in the morning instead. Late June in the South wasn’t any cooler than July would be; in fact, it often felt steamier, because the summer rain clouds hadn’t evaporated. My hair curled into tight spirals in the humidity. As much as I would have liked to use the heat as an excuse to work inside, we had too much to finish outdoors.
“Get the scaffolding set up. I’ll be out in a minute,” I said to Drew. He knew the drill when it came to putting up siding. Jada ran after him, eager to help. The only siding left was high up, but unlike me, she was fearless in high places.
Hope and I looked over an estimate one of the cabinetmakers had taped to the kitchen window. I had selected simple, unfinished cabinets and drawn the basic plan myself. The extra-tall cabinet doors would go all the way to the ceiling and have more drawers than doors on the lower half. Pan drawers, towel drawers, utensil drawers, and bread drawers. I didn’t like digging in back cabinets on my knees. To offset the plain style, a decorative wooden hood over the stove would act as a centerpiece. I had ordered a custom marble-tile image of a Da Vinci sketch, a study of five characters in a comic scene, to set in the backsplash above the stove top. We needed a comedy set in stone.
It was a big kitchen, and since Hope did a lot of the cooking, she was excited. “This is the lowest estimate so far,” she said, measuring her excitement against my skepticism. “Is everything the same?”
“He moved the wall oven. We’d lose the floor-to-ceiling cabinet, but placing the oven away from the refrigerator makes a lot of sense.” I flipped to the computer image of the appliances. “I like it. What do you think?”
She nodded, future baking days dancing in her eyes.
“I’ll call him before I start on siding.” I wasn’t thrilled with the kitchen, but it was good enough. Ain’t no church, my dad would have said with a mock Southern twang. Honestly, I was just tired of making decisions by the armload and didn’t have the energy to linger over this one.
The electricians showed up around suppertime, smiling and barely lifting their feet off the ground. They drilled holes and pulled wire with surprising efficiency. I was actually impressed with them for once, until Hope came out with Roman on one hip. “I think there’s a problem with one of the pipes.”
I thought right away that she must mean a water line, because there wasn’t much that could go wrong with the drain lines when nothing was draining into them yet. But I’d forgotten that Tweedledum and Tweedledee were back on the job. They had drilled a hole in the four-inch sewer line running down from the kids’ upstairs bathroom through a wall in my library.
“Just get one of them couplers, cut it in half, and glue it on over the hole,” Tweedledee said. “Put the seams against the studs and the inspector will never notice.”
The proper way to fix the hole would be to cut out the section of pipe, and replace it with smaller sections of pipe and couplers to hold it all together. It was going to be a real pain, since the bottom was set in concrete and the top was wedged against the ceiling. We had no wiggle room. And the asinine suggestion that I try to slip a spliced-together fix past the inspector wasn’t going to fly with me.
“We’re talking about sewage running down a wall in my library!” I said. Okay, I may have shouted it, actually. I took a deep breath. “We’ll have to cut this section out. Splice in a repair, and retest for leaks.” Damn it was left off but implied by my tone. They didn’t offer to help do the work or pay for the parts, and I wasn’t in the mood to discuss it. I would subtract the replacement parts from their final payment and attach the receipts.
We had electricity in the house, at least in theory, but wouldn’t be able to flip the switch and use it until after the Sheetrock was up and the electrical fixtures and outlets were installed. My confidence well was shallow when it came to the likelihood that the electricians had done things right, and making repairs after they were covered up would be next to impossible.