Every night after the kids went to bed, I worked on a book I’d been trying to write for too long. I had sold a couple of middle-grade novels, but I wanted to break into the adult mystery market. The goal gave me hope for a completely new future.
I was exhausted after doing the laundry and unpacking from our Thanksgiving trip and decided the book could rest for another night. I stacked my hoard of mystery novels on the other side of the bed just under the pillow, where I was pleased to know they would remain undisturbed. It was now the empty side of the bed, not someone else’s side, and that reminded me to breathe easy. I climbed in with a notebook, a pen, and a remnant of the smile I’d taken to bed in the cabin.
I started making a short to-do list of errands to complete before we built a life-size version of our stick house. I really meant to do this, and it felt good. It felt big and loud and real. It felt alive.
The list filled the first page, then the second, and was well on the way to flooding the third when I dozed off. Even though it was already apparent that we were in over our heads, I had no intention of backing down. A woman stubborn enough to stay with an abusive man is not a woman who gives up easily. We would do this. We’d dive in and keep working, eyes straight ahead.
At the top of page four, I wrote, “Plan B.” I stared at the blank page, imagining the depressing alternatives. We could buy a tiny house and stack bunk beds in the corners. I could write in a closet or just give it up and keep programming. The kids would go off to college feeling as low, afraid, and small as they did today. I ripped the page out, crumpled it, and threw it on the floor.
Backup plans were for quitters. They were for people who were scared. They were not for people brave enough to hang red curtains and wear V-neck shirts. I told myself we had faced our worst fears and had nothing more to be afraid of. I pretended I believed it. “It’s do-or-die time,” I whispered. “Do or die.” And then softer, moving my lips with nothing more than a hiss coming out to warn away the nightmares that turned out to be inevitable whether I whispered or shouted, “It’s a figure of speech. Do or die. It’s figurative, not literal.”
The next week was crazy busy, and I wasn’t one to use the “c” word lightly. I spent Monday and Tuesday patrolling a thirty-mile radius from our house, looking for land. Several promising properties were eliminated by the cost, one by a den of snakes, and several more by the strict neighborhood rules that required I use an approved, licensed contractor. I had already checked with the city and learned I could pull my own building and plumbing permits, and act as my own contractor. But that didn’t mean neighborhoods had to approve me as a builder.
At sunset on Tuesday, a flood of texts came in from Drew while Roman and I were half lost and scanning ditches for realtor signs.
Drawing house plans? Drew asked. Where’s the oversize paper? Drafting ruler? Mechanical pencil? Where are you?
“Time to go home,” I told Roman, who had fallen into a sleepy trance. I stopped on the narrow side street I had wandered down and started a three-point turn that doubled to a six-point turn. When I shifted back into drive the final time, I spotted a handmade sign on a tree. Sloppy cursive writing announced one acre, with a barely legible phone number at the bottom. The acre looked like a park, with beautiful hardwoods trimmed high. It was on a hill with a pond on one side and a dense forest behind it. I pulled the passenger-side tires into the grass and got out, half expecting something terrible to appear—another snake den, skunks, vampires. But the land couldn’t be more perfect.
I let Roman climb out, and I called the number while we hiked through the tall grass. “The number you have reached is not in service. Please check—” I redialed, changing the uncertain 0 into an 8.
“We just posted the sign this afternoon,” a woman said, her Southern accent strong enough for a country song. “My daddy gave me that land when I turned eighteen, even though I said I wouldn’t never live next to him. That was thirty years ago now. I decided on a whim to sell.”
I made an offer on the acre over the phone. It was ten thousand less than they were asking but still ten thousand more than I had. Less than an hour later, we signed a basic, handwritten agreement on the hood of my car. When I flipped the paper over at a stop sign, I discovered that it was their receipt for four new truck tires and an alignment at Tire Town. I giggled until a few tears flowed. The entire thing was absurd. Maybe I really had traveled through Drew’s portal to an alternate reality. I wasn’t the sort of girl to buy an acre of land on a tire receipt. Roman laughed with me from the backseat, and I wiped away the tears, sobering. Today, I was exactly that sort of girl. The spontaneous girl in the rearview mirror was me after all.
Drew and I sketched preliminary plans at the dining-room table on giant sheets of paper, glancing over at the stick model for inspiration when things got tedious. We kept our pencils sharp and our lines straight, working into the early-morning hours to make sure the staircase width met code and the landing had enough room to swing around a king-size mattress. Roman slipped by in stealth mode, stealing our erasers and hiding under the table to gnaw on them like a teething puppy. The tenth time I pulled a fat pink eraser from his slobbery fist, I lifted him up to see the stick house. “This is what we’re drawing. We’re going to build a big house like this. One we can live in.”
“Yup,” he said, nodding his head until his eyes jiggled. His feet were running before they hit the floor. He skidded into my mostly empty office, where Hope and Jada were googling energy-efficient building ideas from the PC propped on my great-grandmother’s trunk. When they came up with something good, they shouted it out for us to incorporate. I could have moved the computer to the table, but the chaos of their conversations swinging from excitement to bickering and insults would have driven Drew and me nuts while we struggled to play amateur architect.
We had already named the imagined house Inkwell Manor. It would be the place where my dream of writing for a living came true. I stared down at the model house, imagining Roman crawling up the staircase. A tiny bag of colorful beads hung at the top of the stairs. One of the girls must have added it, but I had no idea why. Another bead bag hung over Hope’s bedroom door, and one over the back door. It was a bizarre way to decorate. Then I spotted a series of sharp screws sticking through a wall in the garage and more by the front door. A mini skateboard blocked the dining-room door. “What on earth?” I mumbled, pricking my index finger against one of the screws.
Drew looked up, wearing a half smile that made him look all grown up. “You found the improvements. What do you think?”
“What are…” Then I saw the slivered edge of a CD along the back door and knew immediately what they had done. “Booby traps.”
“Home Alone–style. Jada did the beads. Hope came up with some ideas that were seriously scary.” He shook his head, but didn’t lose the smile. “It’s what you get, raising kids around your mystery novels.”
“Are these cameras?” I pointed to the acorn hats on every corner of the house’s exterior, and he nodded. Wouldn’t it be nice if they really had made the modifications because I was a mystery writer? Wouldn’t it be nice if imagination were the only thing they had to be afraid of?
I sat back down and sketched as quickly as I could. It was long past time to get out of this house.
On Friday morning I took the plans to a copy shop, painfully aware that even after I had the printer darken the ink they looked like exactly what they were, pencil-drawn renderings done by amateurs. I took them to my bank, shoulders back and confident that my great credit would put me on the fast track to borrow everything I needed. The balding loan officer whose heavy glasses slid to the tip of his nose twice a minute declined my request, and not without a smirk. “We only loan to licensed contractors. Experienced contractors.” Down and back up went the glasses. “I can recommend a couple, hon. They’ll take good care of you.”
I tried two more banks, feeling so defeated at the last that my request sounded more like a squeaky apology. We could do this. I knew it with everything in me. But of course we couldn’t do it without the money to buy supplies. And if the bank made us hire a contractor to oversee the work, we couldn’t afford to do it at all.
Over the weekend I downplayed the rejections to the kids, playing it off like we had tons more options when I hadn’t thought of a single new possibility.
After Roman dropped off to sleep on Sunday night, I remembered something that Jag Fischer, my old boss and the wealthy owner of three magazines, had once told me. He was a small man with wide eyes, perfectly gelled gray hair, and a perfectly full money clip in his front left pocket.
“Banks are easy,” he had insisted. “Do two things and a bank will give you anything you want. First, you give them papers. Bury them with papers. Papers with dollar signs all over them mean you’re important. Doesn’t even matter if the dollar signs have little minus marks in front. To a bank, all dollar signs are golden.” He dropped his hand over his pocket, unconsciously patting his own dollar signs, something he did dozens of times a day. He was right; the dollars made him seem large and in charge. “Second, and this is most important, give the stuffy bastards a deadline. Time is money and you don’t want their old bank wasting yours. You need everything in two days—no more. Be eager and in charge. You make the rules, not them.” He had laughed, shaking his head and no doubt remembering a loan officer pushing his heavy glasses up and sweating over papers while Jag clapped and said, “Chop, chop! I don’t have all day. Gotta keep this money clip full.”
So I stayed up past bedtime gathering three years of tax returns, statements of intent, bills, royalty statements from a couple of small novels and newspapers, documents for energy-efficient roof decking, and a few manuscript pages from my latest mystery novel. It was an impressive stack, all neatly labeled in envelopes and folders. I added a completed loan application for an impressive-looking bank downtown where I had never had any type of account. I may have parked in their lot one time to dash into a nearby bookstore, but that was the closest thing to an affiliation I had with them.
Bright and early, I put on a gray skirt suit, one that had been a little tight until divorce stress claimed the last postbaby pounds. I wore a red shirt underneath, because red meant power, and also because red meant Caroline. After touching up my makeup, I added a simple pearl necklace and earrings. They were department-store pearls, not the sort you passed on to your daughters, but they looked real, and this was a day for appearances, not reality.
As soon as the kids left for school, I dropped Roman off at a day care. I stopped at a shipping store and bought a white cardboard tube to hold my plans, and then sat in the car for a half dozen deep breaths, wishing I could get my head between my knees in the cramped front seat. “Do or die, Cara.”
The car door stuck, but a solid shoulder whack knocked it open. I walked into the high-ceilinged bank lobby like I owned the place, my eyes straight ahead even when I sensed heads turning my way. If my skirt had a pocket, I would have patted it like it was filled with rolls of Benjamins. The loan officer at the floor desk shifted uncomfortably when he saw that I was headed for him. Before I said a word, he looked over his shoulder and waved me back to the head moneylender with the windowed office and heavy cherry door.
“Rothschild,” he said, shaking my hand without getting fully to his feet. “What can we do for you today?” His eyes drifted to his paperwork, so I placed my long cardboard tube on the desk, diagonally across whatever he had found slightly more interesting than me.
“I’m building a house, and I need you to help me cover some of the materials. The labor is taken care of and the land is free and clear. I’ll be the contractor.”
He tipped back in his chair, not exactly propping his feet on his desk but his posture saying that he would have if my cardboard tube weren’t in his way. “You can fill out an application and leave it with my assistant.” And there it was, that smirk they must teach in loan-officer school.
I handed him the completed application. Before he had time to scan much of it, I slid a thin stack of his papers over and dropped three neat folders with labeled tags protruding. “Three years of tax returns,” I said, then lifted the next folder, “and here’s an asset breakdown. The copy of my blueprint,” I tapped my fingertips on the tube, “is yours. I understand you’ll need it for the inspections.” I’d learned that at the last bank, the one that had turned me down before my seat was warm.
“And you’re a licensed contractor?” he asked, leaning forward in his chair, head down while he thumbed through my papers, eyes pausing on the dollar signs.
“I’ve pulled the permits. And while I’m not licensed, I have a lot of experience researching energy-efficient building models.” I added a folder of passive-solar designs to the stack, pretending that I had read as much of it as eleven-year-old Jada had.
But he was tilting back, stalled on the licensed-contractor nonsense. That quick, I’d lost him. The big fish was slipping right back into the pond.
So close. I had been so close.
“It’s vital that I have this by Wednesday—Thursday at the absolute latest. I’m ready to break ground immediately.” I raised my eyebrows, nodding my head. “You can do that for me, right? I was told you could—by Wednesday.”
Who was this damn cheeky girl? She was not me. She was not the Cara who listened in terror to the fi-fah of her husband’s breath while his thumbs pressed blue temporary tattoos on her skin. I had the irresistible urge to rub my neck, but redirected my hand to my clutch, a narrow leather bag that would have been more at home at a cocktail party. It had been that or my large bag filled with Cheerios remnants and tiny notebooks where I jotted down clever dialogue in the grocery line. I pulled out a tiny tin of mints, held it out. “Mr. Rothschild?”
He shook his head, leaning back over the papers and flipping through too fast to be doing anything more than a magician’s trick of distracting me while the number ticker in his head weighed the risk of taking me on.
I dropped a mint on my tongue even though I hadn’t wanted one and was afraid I would either choke on it or start drooling when the menthol hit my sinuses. He held up one of the papers and turned sideways to his computer. I smiled a bit, probably a mirror of the loan-officer smirk, when he slipped a pair of wire reading glasses on his nose before typing in a few numbers. He had barely been able to see my papers, let alone evaluate them with any real accounting math. He was as fake as my pearls.
“No accounts with us?” he asked, looking at the computer screen instead of me.
“This will be my first.”
He scrolled a few pages, probably reading them, or at least the important parts. I was fairly certain it was my credit score he was looking at, and thankfully it was in remarkably good shape. I’d never liked debt and paid everything off in record time. But more than one man in my past had gone on spending sprees that gave me plenty to pay off.
“And you’ll be able to do this immediately? By Wednesday?” I repeated, hoping he was distracted enough not to notice that my confidence, which had been unprecedentedly high to this point, was waning. My voice hadn’t squeaked, but it had been a touch too high, too plaintive. I pushed my shoulders back and dropped my chin, willing my voice to drop, too. “I’ll finish the foundation work before Christmas. Ice makes everything more complicated.”
He sat back, his chair spinning slowly back toward me, seemingly on its own. His eyes focused on the edge of his desk, which I could see had been nicked, probably by the arms of this chair. Little imperfections like that would irritate a perfectionist, an accountant. As the silence stretched between us, the wall clock above his desk seemed to grow louder. The second hand jerked unsteadily through the uphill side of each minute with two steps forward and one step back.
An image of him jumping up and throwing his computer monitor across the room made me wince. That was the last straw! I imagined him yelling, his glasses dropping to the floor and his hands coming for my throat. What were you thinking? You are too weak for this, Cara! But his hands were actually steepled at his chin, another thing they must teach in business school, the contemplative pose, similar to Rodin’s Thinker but with interlaced fingers to symbolize unity. We’re in this together.
“I think,” he said, slow and deliberate, bouncing his finger steeple off his chin. “I think we’re going to be able to get this to you.”
“By Wednesday?” I asked, fully aware I was pushing my luck.
He stood, and stuck out his hand. Somehow I managed to prop myself on my own shaky legs to return his firm handshake while his closemouthed smile signaled that we were now partners but would never be friends. “By Thursday,” he said, letting me know that no matter how I’d entered the building, I did not own it after all. “Sit tight. I’ll get your paperwork.”
I walked out the front door, chin high, and with a construction loan for nearly a third more than I’d asked for. Sweat dripped between my shoulder blades and down the back of my knees in endless rivers.
“We did it! We have the money for everything we need and then some!” I shouted the minute the kids walked through the door. I had already told Roman, but the only part of celebrating he was interested in was the part that came with dessert.
The older kids were happy, but I detected a tiny bit of hesitation. We were celebrating our own enslavement. This project would chain us to a job site, and the work wasn’t going to be easy.
“It’s going to be a busy year!” Drew rubbed his hands together.
I shrugged, narrowing my eyes. “Actually, a busy nine months. Turns out a standard construction loan is not a full year.”
“Nine months, then,” Drew said, his eyebrows lifting under a couple of stray curls. The kids would be in school all day and I would have to keep my freelance jobs to pay the bills, which meant I’d be working full-time as a programmer and writing three to four hours a day. Nine months was possible … for an experienced crew. But for four kids and a woman who had struggled for more than an hour to get the light covers off the fluorescents in the garage last week, nine months was a heck of a stretch.
I closed my eyes and saw the tall glass of lemonade with the red and white paper straw, the last straw. It didn’t scare me like it used to.
I licked my lips and went to the pantry for a jug of lemonade. “It’s Cancún night!” I announced, the way I always did when we were having Mexican food. Once upon a time, Adam and I had spent a lot of time scuba diving, and Cancún had been a favorite spot.
“Everybody chops!” Hope said, waving her siblings toward cutting boards. Together, we made an enormous fajita dinner, talking and laughing with salsa music turned up loud. I couldn’t help wondering if it was a last-meal celebration. We wouldn’t have much time for hot meals in the next nine months. The three oldest did homework while I did cleanup, and then we herded into the car to drive the seven miles to our land, which was now officially our job site.
I’d brought four stakes—actually two old broom handles cut in half—a ball of neon-pink string, and a hundred-foot tape measure. The sun was setting but we could see well enough to pick the general location of the house on the upper section of our sloping acre. We pushed the stakes into the soggy earth with as much pride as Neil Armstrong claiming the moon. I had the distant thought that survey equipment was probably supposed to be brought in at this stage to align the front of the house with the road, some three hundred feet in front of it.
“Should we measure from the street back to this spot?” I asked, stomping next to the first stake.
“Just eyeball it,” Drew said, and we did.
The rectangle of our neon-pink string looped around the broom stakes looked far too small to hold all the rooms we’d painstakingly designed, far too small to hold a life. I’d read that that would be the case, that during early phases the house would look too small and other times it would feel far too big. We had measured rooms and furniture, so I knew it wasn’t as small as it looked. I stood in the muddy corner where my library would sprout and looked out an imaginary window. “It’s perfect,” I said.
“It’s home,” Hope added.
Then Roman threw up his fajitas and we loaded back in the car, all marveling over how fast his fever had come on and hoping he could make the seven miles back to the house without any more reappearing fajitas or surprises.
The rest of the fajitas stayed down, but the surprises did not.
The week before Christmas had visions of power tools dancing in our heads. I found a guy with a backhoe to dig the footer, a process we had only seen on YouTube videos but felt like we understood fairly well. We did our best to square up the broom handles by running lines diagonally across the rectangle in a giant X. Theoretically, according to a fiftyish guy in Utah who went by geo39th, if the lines of the X were the same length, and each of our parallel edges were equal lengths, the house would be perfectly square. Since this seemed like an important starting point, we hoped he was right.
I showed up thirty minutes early the morning Jimmy and his backhoe had agreed to be there, but he had still beat me by another thirty. I shouldn’t have stopped for Christmas baking supplies.
“Wanted to beat the traffic,” Jimmy said, or something like it. His Southern accent was so dramatically skewed by the thick plug of tobacco under his gray lip that I had spent the first five minutes of our phone conversation trying to translate his words from Spanish before I realized he was speaking some form of English. I nodded. Any miscommunication could be blamed on tractor noise. He stared at me, a loan-officer smirk on his face. Nothing wrong with being early, but it surprised me that he hadn’t started digging. His tractor was burning fuel by the bathtub.
“Chalk?” he asked.
I shrugged, as lost as if he’d asked what I thought about dem Yanks or whatever sport was in season.
“Gotta mark it.”
“Yes.” I nudged a broomstick with my toe. How could he possibly miss my neon-pink string?
He raised his eyebrows, eyes shining with a gleam of amusement I was going to have to get used to seeing. “Bucket’ll tangle in yo pretty string.”
I’d bought the string at the lumberyard. They’d had orange and pink. I’d picked pink not because I was a girl, but because it looked especially visible and didn’t look like hunting gear. Okay, and maybe partly because I was a girl. At any rate, it was construction string and I thought we had used it the right way. This was how geo39th marked his Utah foundation. I’d watched him run his strings more than a dozen times. But I looked at the gaping teeth on the backhoe’s orange bucket and could see he was right. We had missed a step—apparently an important one. “Chalk?”
“Or top-side-down sprayin’ paint.”
“Chalk?” I asked again, imagining an extralarge chunk of Roman’s sidewalk chalk and trying for a visual of how that could possibly help me mark a footing.
“Comes in a bag.” He wiped thick, tanned fingers down his face and checked his watch.
“Bag of chalk. Hold on!” I ran to my car, sinking ankle-deep in a mud pocket along the way and carefully ignoring the cold goo seeping through my sock. Contractors don’t shake off the mud; they wear it like a badge. I opened my trunk and grabbed a five-pound bag of flour. It had turned out to be a good thing that Roman expected a dozen batches of cookies over the school break.
I straddled the line with my right foot in my future library and my left in the front yard, ripped the corner off the bag of flour, and walked backward, bent at the waist and leaving a powdery white line to outline the house. I had been moving fast, conscious that the clock was running on the backhoe, and didn’t look up at Jimmy until I reached my starting point. He gave a little salute while I pulled the string out of the way, dragging it across the yard with two of the stakes flopping along behind like fish on a stringer. I saluted back, feeling like one of the guys.
Jimmy carved perfect trenches into the earth, and the idea of our house merging deep past the surface sent a thrill through me. Digging deep was never easy, but it was always worthwhile. I wound my pink string into a ball. Everything would have to be used and reused for us to come in under budget. I leaned the stakes against a tree and carried the empty flour sack to the car. “‘Self-rising,’” I read from the label. “Don’t I wish.”
If wishes were fishes, we’d all cast nets, my grandma used to say. And wasn’t that the truth? I wasn’t much of a wisher anymore, though; I wasn’t watching the stars or pulling off flower petals while waiting for good things to find me. I was building them.
Jimmy pulled an old stump and an enormous root system out of the general area of our future refrigerator and loaded it on his trailer next to his backhoe. We exchanged a fair amount of dirt and flour with a vigorous handshake, and I wrote him a smudged check with only his first name because I hadn’t quite understood his last name despite the three occasions I’d asked him to repeat it.
“Know how to set da rebar?” he asked, truck door open and one foot on the bent, mud-encrusted running board.
I angled my head toward the oak where I’d propped the stakes and pink string. A fat bag of black rebar chairs rested against the oak like a lumpy pillow.
“Shit.” Jimmy spit a nauseating brown stream. “Better off usin’ rocks in dat clay mess. Got a mini spring yonder.” He pointed at the far corner of my den. “Wear yo hip waders.” He laughed and I joined him. Might as well. Once I sorted out what all that meant, it would probably be funny.
“Thanks, Jimmy. I’ll be calling you for the Donna Fill before long.”
He nodded and pulled away, no doubt with a fine story to tell at the next job site.
I had barely squeaked through the ground breaking even with a professional on site to fix my mistakes. Now that I was all alone, the gaping foundation holes were as daunting as pathways to the underworld. Even repetitive viewings of geo39th’s wise overview of footings hadn’t managed to make me look like an expert. If I went back and watched the video, I was willing to bet I’d see a line of chalk or paint when the backhoe ate a hole in the earth. He had probably imagined that any imbecile would know enough to take that step. It went without saying. You couldn’t leave the strings and stakes up for the dig. That would be just plain stupid. And even though geo39th had sworn by the rebar chairs, he wasn’t working in red clay. And what was this about a mini spring? I walked around the trench, my courage as unstable as the wet earth.
The far corner where Jimmy had directed his laughter was closest to the neighbor’s pond. It was still a good 250 feet from the water, but there was no question he was right. The neatly squared corner held at least six inches of water, and the water was pooling higher and building to a stream moving toward the front of the footing.
“Hip waders? All my boots have heels.” I kicked a layer of mud off my old running shoes. They weren’t going to be the ideal footwear for the construction project after all.
Look at your feet, I heard Matt say with a contemptuous snarl. And as badly as I wanted to feel superior and strong and a million years away from the effect of his shaming, I didn’t. I felt inadequate, like I was a failure with big feet and a small, small mind. What made me think I could build a house? I had just made a fool of myself, breaking ground with our self-rising Christmas flour. The loan officer would flash me a classic smirk for that one—and I deserved it.
I pulled my muddy shoes off into a shopping bag and drove back to the house in cold stocking feet. The image of Caroline’s tornado house that had been perfectly clear in my mind that morning had faded into a blur that barely felt real. Balancing the kids, work, and building a house felt impossible. What had I been thinking? I had a big software project to roll out. My mystery novel, which I thought of as my future, had a weak protagonist and a weaker plot. I had freelance articles to get to the newspaper, and we needed the cash to keep paying the bills. It wasn’t going to be easy. What had Mr. Rothschild been thinking? The bank had been insane to loan me money; I was a terrible gamble.
Hershey greeted me with a stripe of fur on her back raised into a Mohawk. The house was quiet and empty.
I had less than an hour to work on an article before the kids came home. Hope would pick Roman up on her way, and he would be clingy and cranky after a long day in day care. I felt a little clingy and cranky myself, so that suited me just fine. Everything worthwhile had run out of my mind, leaving me raw and empty. My editing progress sucked even more than usual, and tomorrow’s deadline loomed closer and more impossible by the minute.
The courage I hoped to find building a house wasn’t going to drop in my lap; I was going to have to hunt it down and trap it. Fifteen minutes before the afternoon chaos arrived, I stretched out on my bed with my eyes closed, my mind buzzing with to-do lists. Years ago, I had tried guided meditation but had never mastered it. There had never been a time when I needed to clear the space between my ears more than that moment.
I talked myself through what I remembered of the old meditation CD. Squeeze and then relax your toes. Your calves. Your fingertips. Feel a warm breeze passing over your body. A bright light rose up and wrapped around me. Had that been part of the CD? It was peaceful, so I floated awhile, weightless and empty. The CD man had told me in a low, gravelly voice that people often met their true selves on deep meditation journeys. My true self was superb at hiding, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to meet her anyhow. I shivered, losing my concentration. What if I found Caroline there, standing in the upstairs window, framed by the red curtains? Even though I admired that imaginary woman, I was afraid to meet her, afraid she would narrow her eyes at my weakness, my fear.
Breathing deep, I fell weightless in the center of the warm light. I opened my eyes—not for real, but in the little dream world—and someone was sitting cross-legged near my right hip, chin pressed on his chest to look down at me. It wasn’t my true self unless my deepest soul was an elderly black man with a sun-weathered face and narrow, dark eyes.
He sat perfectly still with his hands in his lap. His lips stretched flat, expressionless, and I had the sense there were few teeth behind them. His eyes felt wise and a little world-weary. He was trying to tell me something with those eyes, and I hoped it wasn’t another damn secret I was supposed to intuitively absorb. I was tired of life’s coded messages. I willed him to speak, to tell me the grand secret of life. He didn’t say a word, just continued looking down at me, rarely blinking but stretching it out long and slow when he did, like he was falling asleep and waking again. His name was Benjamin; I knew that without him saying.
Tell me I’m going to be okay. Tell me we’ll make it. Tell me something I can believe in. But his dark eyes took in every minuscule detail of my soul without giving me anything back. The strange man simply existed, nothing more. Then Hershey barked and the front door swung in to bounce hard against the doorstop. The bright little world vanished.
I felt calmer, more in charge, like I was able to take a full breath for the first time in years. But I was also a little afraid of the old man. Who was he? And what if I didn’t like what he was there to tell me? I bit my bottom lip. Life had tossed me some hard deals; whatever the old man had to say, I could take it. I promised myself I’d try it again, maybe every day, until I really did find my true self and understood the island man’s presence.
The kids announced homework and school drama. A teacher had been put on leave for an investigation, a janitor had helped a special-needs kid after a bad fall, and one of Jada’s friends was going out with the boy Jada had liked for two years. Hope and I made pork chops, potatoes, and corn on the cob, with Roman serving up plastic cakes and cookies on mini dishes while we worked. He wasn’t clingy after all, but slow and quiet without his afternoon nap.
After cleanup, Drew and I drove the seven miles to the job site while the girls did homework and took care of Roman. I had a concrete truck scheduled for the next morning to pour the footer, but the rebar had to be in place first. Instead of boots and hip waders, we had put our feet into tall bread bags and secured rubber bands around the ankles before putting on our running shoes. It kept the water a thin layer away from our skin, but not far enough to keep us warm.
Even in the South, December was cold. When we leaned over the edge of the trench to lop off roots, it was twenty-eight degrees and falling by the second. My feet were dead numb by the time we climbed down into the trench. Drew handed down ten-foot pieces of rebar, which is a half-inch steel rod used to reinforce concrete. I spaced the bars out in the trenches, hands so cold that the only thing saving my grip was the ribbed surface designed for a better concrete bond. We made four parallel lines of rebar all the way around the rectangle of the house and the smaller rectangle of the porch. The mini spring Jimmy pointed out had become a gusher. Drew affectionately named it the Ink Spill.
Our gloves did little more than hold a cold layer of ice water against our hands. Someone had probably invented a waterproof glove for this sort of work, but none of the videos we watched had mentioned it. I had never in my life imagined being so cold and miserable. Playing in four-foot snowbanks in a Wisconsin winter was warmer than being sopping wet in an Arkansas December. We used rocks to prop up the rebar, like Jimmy had suggested, but even they sunk in the mud slop faster than Gilligan in quicksand. Drew insisted the rebar chairs were exactly the thing we needed, so we ripped open the bag and propped a few in place. They looked like four-inch-tall traffic cones with a crescent support at the top to prop the rebar. In theory they were perfect, but their little heads vanished before we’d reached the end of the first trench.
After sunset, I turned on the headlights and we kept working with no noticeable progress. Somewhere along the way, we caught a case of the giggles. One of us mentioned that the Ink Spill could turn into the Ink Tsunami, and we imagined waves of water barreling through the trenches—which unfortunately wasn’t much of a stretch. Drew literally rolled around on a grassy spot, breath gone with laughter, while I sat next to him and smeared laughter tears with clay.
By then we had managed a system of placing flat rocks and then propping the rebar chairs on top of them. The rocks acted like miniature footers for the holders and the rebar was at least visible above the mud. “I’d say that’s a professional rebar job,” I said when I could speak again. My cheeks ached from smiling, and I loved the feel of happy tension. Our laughter needed to be pulled out and exercised more often.
“Think it will hold up Inkwell Manor?” he asked, then laughed even harder, gasping until I started to worry about him.
“What? What is it? More Ink Tsunami?” I was laughing, too, but without a target.
He shook his head. “It’s Sinkwell,” he managed between belly laughs. “Sinkwell Manor!”
“And it’s a wrap,” I said, peeling off my gloves and dragging mud-encrusted tools to the car. I twisted the key so the interior could heat while we packed up and put our shoes in shopping bags. We had flip-flops for the ride home.
We sat inside for a couple of minutes, the headlights shining on the trenches that had undergone another magical transformation, looking barely big enough for two rooms let alone a whole house. The heat sobered us while we worked through the painful sting of defrosting nerves and vessels. My nose tingled. I put the car in gear, and Drew turned on the dome light to search for his phone. I caught sight of my hands on the steering wheel and said, “Oh!”
Drew jumped and held his own hands up to the light. Like mine, they were a dead purple-gray from fingertip to wrist. We laughed most of the way home, now and then managing a word or two. “The gloves! The ink. Inkwell!”
We made it home before eleven, me hoping the ink would wash off and him hoping it wouldn’t. Hope gave us a thumbs-up when we lied and told her the work had gone perfectly. Jada and Roman were long asleep, both in my bed.
It was almost two weeks before the footing was poured. First an ice storm set us back, then the holidays, then an overbooked concrete company giving priority to contractors they knew. The delay gave us time to draw plans for a 450-square-foot workshop to store tools and supplies. It was obvious that hauling tools and supplies back and forth between houses was going to get more and more difficult. So we made a basic two-by-four frame with stakes pounded in to hold it straight—or what passed for straight in our amateur construction world. This way, when the concrete truck finally backed up our long drive it could pour both at once. At least that’s what I imagined.
In reality they made two separate pours a week apart. The foundation pour didn’t have to be smoothed much, just enough to prop concrete blocks on top. But the shop pour would actually end up being the permanent floor, so we rented long-handled floaters and did our best to make it perfect. Despite being a lifelong perfectionist, my definition of the word had relaxed dramatically over the past few months. “Good enough,” I declared when my biceps were burning and my feet were heavy enough with dried concrete to sink me in the neighbor’s pond for good.
Our nine-month construction loan was well under way, but our house was not. I pretended we could make up the time during easier phases of the build. But a little voice told me there was no such thing, and it grew more and more difficult to hear my own determination over the voice of reality.