Rise: How a House Built a Family(80)

I had lost some of my urgency and gained an appreciation for tiny moments. The way my breath moved slow and calm in and out of my lungs felt good. The sheets felt luxuriously smooth. Even my pillowcase’s fake mountain-fresh scent that came from a softener bottle made me smile.





–21–

Rise

Glue Me Back Together

I slept that night with my punctured leg propped and iced after I’d soaked it in peroxide, then alcohol, then applied antibiotic cream, then taped a split-open aloe vera leaf to it. My whole body tingled from the fiberglass insulation, but the worst of it had washed away in the shower. If I hadn’t been too dehydrated to make tears, I would have cried myself to sleep.

Benjamin was there as soon as I made the conscious effort to relax my shoulders and imagine a disk of light passing through me. He was leaning over me, his face clear. I studied him, wanting his pity to validate how pitiful I felt. Per usual, his expression was more happy than sad, more peace than pity. His eyes smiled and his lips curved barely past a neutral expression. It wasn’t mocking, like I had thought for the first few seconds. He was encouraging in a way that told me I could do everything I set out to do and then some.

I wished he’d say the words, speak out loud that he was proud of me. How long had it been since I had heard words like that from anyone but my parents? Years. He didn’t speak, and I realized he probably never would. The look in his eyes would have to be enough. I exhaled, at peace, and slept right through my morning alarm.

The kids would be in the way at the job site, with the Sheetrock guys spraying the finish texture inside and hanging the sheets in the garage ceiling over our insulation. I left them at the house with a list of simple chores and went to my doctor for a tetanus shot. Dr. Sam—short for Samantha—gave me a list of things to watch for with the puncture wound. It had a high risk of infection, but she thought it looked clean considering the conditions it had happened under. I was thankful I didn’t need stitches.

I wished I could go home for a nap, but had to go in to the office instead. My commute was about twenty-five minutes, and that was the only time I ever found myself alone. I realized on that drive that I was feeling restless and a little vengeful, so I started thinking about Caroline again. She had been lying low lately, and I missed her. There were still things I needed to learn from her strength.

When I got home, the Sheetrock foreman called to say the job was done and ready for me to check out, which was code for “Come over and write me a check.”

The kids were as anxious to see the finished walls as I was, so we loaded into the car with Hershey and drove over.

“I can’t believe how many rooms there are!” Jada said, dancing through the upstairs. “Just a few days ago, I could walk through that wall!” She bumped up against the wall separating her room from one of the upstairs bathrooms.

The first thing I noticed was how much quieter it was. Work in one room didn’t echo through the entire house and ricochet through my skull like it had for months. We all went to our own rooms, except Roman, who bounced among all of them like a pinball. I lay down in the spot where my bed would be and stared at the ceiling. Even though we were a long way from finished, even though my calf ached, I couldn’t stop smiling. We were actually doing it. We were building our own house, and it looked every bit as good as what a real construction crew could have built.

Red. I would put red curtains in my room and a fuzzy rug beside my bed to curl my toes in. “We’re a kick-ass family,” I whispered to Caroline, and I felt her smile along with me. She’d been hanging out in the shadows all along.

It was the first of August, which made the countdown to our September 13 deadline impossibly close. The rest of our to-do list was on us, and it was more like three months long if everything went perfectly. Impossible. But we’d done impossible before, albeit not when we were quite so exhausted. The stolen minutes to look at the ceiling were a guilty pleasure we couldn’t afford. I sat up. “Drew? You ready to put in a couple doors?”

He didn’t answer, so I stalled for him, reviewing the list on my phone. Doors, trim, caulk, paint, hardwood flooring, concrete flooring, tile, showers, bathtubs, toilets, cabinets installed, stain and finish cabinets, make concrete countertops, install sinks and plumbing fixtures, lights, switches, outlets, stairs, rails, exterior porch rails, back steps and rail, garage doors, concrete slab, library shelves. I rearranged the items in what I guessed was the right order.

It really wasn’t possible. Not even for an experienced construction crew working overtime. Our budget was too tight to hire workers, because I had no intention of using all the money the bank had approved. If I did, I wouldn’t be able to afford the final mortgage of Inkwell. This was a low-budget build. I had to make it work.

I found Drew downstairs. He had carried in three doors by himself and propped them against the wall in the dining room. While it would have been nice to believe he realized how overwhelming our list was, I knew his enthusiasm was because he thought we were almost finished. As hard as we’d been pushing for almost eight months, the final six weeks were going to be even more difficult, and we were going in feeling fully spent. I didn’t say any of this to the kids. Whatever well they could find to pull enthusiasm from, I wouldn’t dampen it. Not yet.

The girls were cleaning the upstairs, getting the floor ready for the hardwood, which was in two-inch tongue-and-groove strips that would be glued to the subfloor. Roman was in his room, zooming Matchbox cars—real ones rather than painted rocks—around and around the stack of hardwood flooring. Drew and I installed the laundry-room and pantry doors faster than we had any of the exterior doors, but the downstairs bathroom went wrong and then more wrong before we got it to close evenly. It was dark by the time we finished, and we were working with a shop light that put off a lot of heat. “Enough doors for tonight,” I said, expecting Drew to want to head back to the house.