Taz is on his knees when she tells him, his arms abuzz with the repeated hammer blows, tingling and tweaking. He looks up, ears buzzing too, the pry bar and his fingers wedged underneath another six inches of the damned kryptonite subfloor.
Thumbs hooked into her tool belt, like now she’ll just get back after all that pesky lath, Marnie watches him, smile just waiting to bloom, and says it again.
He blinks, lifts an eyebrow, and wriggles his fingers free, rubs away some dust. “For real?” he says.
Fighting back the grin, she reaches into the pencil slot in her tool belt and eases up the pregnancy test, just a peek, pushes it back down. “The eaglet has landed.”
Taz glances around the living room; the wall facing the kitchen just studs, plaster littering the floor, nail-hole freckles where the lath used to be, the whole room’s old fir trim taken down, stacked beside the shop out back, waiting for him to catch enough time to strip the gazillion coats of paint. More plaster peels away from the gaps where the trim used to be. Ancient cloth-wrapped black wiring sags between the naked studs, ringed here and there by dingy white porcelain knobs and tubes. The floor looks exploded, broken shanks of the plywood splintering up in the air, the maple underneath glue-streaked, filthy, like some pharaoh’s treasure finally touched again by light. Dust motes drift through it all, wherever the sun penetrates the gaps around the doors, the double-hung windows. He takes it all in, just a glance, but still, too long.
Marnie’s face shifts, the bloom fading, and he says, “Oh my sweet baby Jesus,” and struggles to stand, his knees older than they were a second ago, all his joints tightened. He wraps her up, dust puffing wherever he touches. “Oh my sweet baby Jesus,” he whispers into her hair.
“So, you found religion?” Marnie says, pulling back to study him.
“Born again,” he says.
“Not even born yet,” she answers. “Just heading our way.”
Over her shoulder, he keeps studying the room this baby will land in. The dust-coated tools scattered through the carnage; the dulled and nicked inch-and-a-half chisel, the battered Sawzall, its bent blade, the indestructible crowbar. Like trying to baby-proof Baghdad. He gives Marn a kiss, a long one, wondering, and they’re in the middle of it when Rudy walks in through the kitchen, just showing up, wrecking bar in one hand, long-neck bottle in the other. “Oh,” he says. “That’s nice.”
They break apart, in no hurry, Taz still staggered.
“You could get a room, you know,” Rudy says.
“We may have to,” Taz answers, but Marnie pulls him back, whispers in his ear. “Clam up,” she says. “Until it’s safe.”
Taz nods, but safe? Seriously? He wants to say, Nothing is ever going to be safe again. But he keeps nodding, turns toward Rudy, and says, “You brought beer?”
Rudy shoots him a wtf? Says, “From your fridge. Want one?”
Marnie shakes her head, and just catching it, Taz does, too.
Rudy raises an eyebrow, glances for a watch he doesn’t own. “It is Saturday, isn’t it?” he says. “I mean, I know I’m late, but not that late, right?”
“No, it’s still Saturday,” Taz says.
Rudy takes a swig, lifts his bar. “Well, okay then, suit yourselves. Just show me what you need wrecked.”
“Demoed,” Taz corrects.
“Whatever you want to call it.” He stabs the end of the bar into the wall, breaking the plaster, pulling down the next few pieces of lath.
“One of these days,” Taz says, “we’re going to have to, you know, start building, not just tearing down.”
“Beyond my skill set,” Rudy answers.
“We’re beyond just about everything,” Taz starts, and Marnie gives him a poke in the side with her hammer handle.
She goes up beside Rudy, digs in the claw of her hammer. Taz comes up behind and starts to slip the flimsy dust mask over her head.
Marnie lifts her hand to ward him off. “Thing’s a pain,” she says, then stops, giving herself a tiny slap upside the head, and adjusts the elastic strap, takes a few deep-sea-diver breaths, in, out. They all three of them get back to tearing the place apart.
Hardly more than a month before, after another of Marnie’s mother’s visits, the demolition held off for it, her mother sent a note saying she’d bought a new bed for them. Mattresses, the works. All down at Wagner’s, waiting to be picked up. “You should not have to sleep on the floor,” she wrote to Marnie, but aiming straight at Taz. Out back, in the converted old garage he’d scabbed a shed-roof addition onto and declared his shop, even though the ruptured and rotted concrete floor made moving tools almost impossible, he was working the tung oil into the bedframe he’d been obsessing over for months. The best pieces of cherry he’d magpied off jobs for years, scoured the state for, every board gone over like Sherlock with his magnifier.
But they did pick up the mattresses. And, without a second of hesitation, Marnie pocketed the return money for the bedframe, said, “She’ll never even think to miss it.” A bounty undreamed of.
And, then, well, jesus, the new mattress and all, they had to give it a try, take it for a test drive or two. Three. More. And now, this.