Rise: How a House Built a Family(76)
The times when we were overwhelmed with things to do were tough, but it was always more difficult when we were waiting for other people to complete tasks. So the next few weeks had us all on edge while the cellulose insulation was blown in the walls, the final bricks were laid, and the Sheetrock was hung and finished. We did a lot of cleanup and planning inside and out, and on a hot July afternoon, we put fiberglass insulation in the ceiling of the garage so my room above would be more energy-efficient.
“It’s literally a hundred and ten degrees,” Hope said, checking her phone. “This is a deep layer of hell.”
I didn’t want to tell her that carrying the insulation rolls into the garage and setting up the ladders was the easy part. We’d bought six-inch rolls that we’d double in the twelve-inch-deep ceiling space. But the fluffy fiberglass had a paper backing on it that would create a moisture barrier between the layers if we left it there. Not good. I started ripping the paper backing off half of the rolls, marveling at first over how easy it was compared with how difficult it had seemed in my mind. Drew took my prepared rolls and started shoving them in place, layering the paper-backed layer underneath with Hope just behind him stapling the paper to the ceiling joists to hold everything up.
When I finished peeling away paper, Jada and I started our own assembly line, with her handing insulation up to me while I shoved and stapled with an electric staple gun. She also kept the cord and long pieces of insulation from tangling. Thankfully, Roman napped in the back of the shop through the worst of it.
The job would have been miserable in the dead of winter with us wearing full protective clothing. But covering every inch of skin with thick clothing in the heat would have killed us, so we bargained between heatstroke and discomfort with thinner gear than we probably should have. We were overheated and sweaty, with tiny shards of fiberglass coating us; it was the worst I had felt in my life, truly a task I wouldn’t wish on an enemy. A layer of hell, indeed.
“Worse than being tarred and feathered,” Drew said.
“I feel like fire ants are all over me!” Jada whined.
“I want to die,” Hope added, and I silently agreed with all of them.
We traded jokes for a while, then complaints a while longer. But before we were halfway done, we were too miserable to speak. Drew’s CD stopped—someone must have forgotten to hit the repeat button when they started it—and no one bothered to turn it back on. We gestured when we needed something, grunted when we smashed a finger, and rehydrated when we started blacking out from heat exhaustion. As horrible as I felt, seeing my kids so far past fatigue and discomfort that they couldn’t even bicker and complain made the whole thing worse.
Roman woke up and toddled out of the shop clenching his grungy cat, Peek-a-boo, in one fist. He stood in the doorway watching us, and no one had to tell him to stay out. He could see that whatever was happening in the garage, it was not fun. I handed him a juice box from the cooler, and he sat under a tree in his Tweety Bird lawn chair, perfectly silent in honor of our obvious suffering. Hershey sat with him, whining now and then over the unhappy tension.
We stapled the last row up when the sun was a glowing ball of unrelenting heat on the horizon. There were no celebratory dances. No victory. No words. The insulation had inflicted enough pain to be the battle victor.
We rinsed our faces, arms, and legs with the hose, but it did little more than cool us. Our clothes and hair were still filled with bits of fiberglass that rained down when we moved and stuck to our damp skin. A shower and generous handfuls of soap followed by equally generous handfuls of lotion was the only thing that would offer relief. Still silent, we packed tools away and loaded up the car.
“Crap,” Drew said, pointing to a stack of concrete-reinforcement wire in the driveway. We were trapped. Blocked in. The six-by-twelve-foot grids of rusty wire had been delivered that morning and we’d forgotten all about it. Eventually, the wire would reinforce the slab outside our garage and a driveway up to the shop. The rest of our long drive would be paved after we’d moved in and I saved up the money. But the only thing that mattered just then was that the wire was blocking our way out. I took a few steps toward it, measuring the idea of driving around without hitting a tree or a muddy sinkhole. I might have taken the risk if I hadn’t remembered that the Sheetrock truck would need to get up the driveway bright and early.
I went to the shop for a pair of gloves, and the kids followed, silently sorting through the milk crate of gloves for a right-and-left pair, no matter the size or mismatched colors.
Drew and Hope stood on one of the short ends and I took the other. The wire sheets tangled in each other when we lifted them two at a time, and then tangled in the long grass and shrubs when we dragged them across to the edge of our property. On the final trip, we struggled with three sheets, determined not to walk all the way back for a single piece. We hadn’t eaten much all day and were at the edge of heatstroke. If the pinpricks of fiberglass hadn’t been torturing us, we might have slowed down and been more careful. I might have watched the four-inch spikes of wire sticking out from my end of the sheet as carefully as I watched the grass for the copperhead snakes that we knew lived nearby. But we were tired. We were desperate. And we were less careful than we should have been.
When the spike of rusty metal stuck into my left calf, I thought for one instant that it was just a scratch and my exhaustion had focused the pain, made me overreact. But when I bent over to look, the spike was shorter than it should have been by nearly two inches.