Rise--How a House Built a Family Read online

  The old man, thin-shouldered and withered from sunlight, had seen me naked. Not skin naked, but soul naked, and that was scarier than revealing the stretch marks on my tummy or the mole under my right breast. I had started moving past feeling like a victim of Adam and Matt, which sounds like a good thing, but my angry thoughts of revenge were dark enough to scare me. Blaming them on Caroline, a spirit I’d made up, wasn’t going to hold for long. And if they were really and truly my thoughts from the start, then I knew that Benjamin would see them. And the things from before—like that I’d stayed with Adam and let my kids be damaged by his insanity, or that I hadn’t left Matt even when he slammed my pregnant body into walls or left bruises on my neck—Benjamin would know those things, too. I imagined him snarling in disapproval, looking away in disgust, and saying, “You should have been more like Caroline. She would never jack things up like you have. Caroline, come here, sweetheart. Show Cara how to fix this mess. Take pity on her.”

  Without even considering that my focus would call him up, I pulled the covers to my chin and slipped directly into my meditation world instead of sleep. The light was there, warm and inviting enough that I forgot I was afraid to enter. Caroline didn’t show herself, invisible as always, but Benjamin was there, cross-legged and looking deep into my eyes. I didn’t want to be afraid of him, I wanted to get him talking. So I did the only thing I could think of, a move my grandpa had taught me many years ago: I took away my enemy’s bargaining chip. No one could make me feel paralyzed or manipulated by secrets if I didn’t have any. I opened my mind and welcomed him without restriction.

  Go ahead, I told him. Weigh the good and bad of me.

  Once he knew every little corner, I could move on from that dreadful place. If he didn’t like what he saw, then he could move on, too. He was part of my own mind, a creation of my subconscious, which had to mean I could boot him right out if I wanted to. As soon as I thought it, I knew it wasn’t true. I did not create Benjamin, he simply was, and I had no more power to boot him out than to make him speak.

  Chin a notch too high and avoiding eye contact, I must have looked like a defiant teenager. This is me, damn it. This is who I am and what I’ve done. Take it or leave it.

  Benjamin didn’t move, just watched me with his slow-motion blink the only proof he wasn’t a statue. His lip didn’t snarl in disgust, and his eyebrows remained smooth, relaxed. The furrows on his brow were from age and smiles, not disapproval. I had the sense that he was not only watching me, but watching out for me, and then I slept. There were no nightmares and no lectures from Caroline, and I now understood that those were two different things.

  Roman and Jada were playing upstairs when I woke. The sun was up, but it was a cloudy, gray winter day, the sort made for sleeping in and watching movies with repeated rounds of hot tea, hot coffee, and hot cocoa. Not for us, of course, but for other people. For people who left house building to the experts.

  I made coffee, smiling over how necessary the dark brew had become. I’d never been a coffee drinker, only taking small sips on occasion, and then only when it was more cream than brew. While I wasn’t exactly drinking it black these days, I was certainly turning more mainstream, with a touch of cream and barely any sugar. Jada and Roman slid down the stairs on their butts, fuzzy pajama bottoms turning the ride slick. Still, it looked more painful than any spanking they’d ever had from me.

  “Pie! I want apple pies and roast beast!” Roman shouted, right hand raised as though he had triumphantly slain the beast himself.

  “That’s exactly what Christmas pie is for,” I said, cutting a slice of apple for myself. “For breakfast.” I had always started baking the desserts early so they were spread out over the entire holiday break. “You’ll have to wait until Santa comes to eat the roast beast though.”

  Hope joined us, making a plate of beef-and-bean burritos for breakfast. Jada had cereal, dropping a couple of fresh cranberries in the milk in place of strawberries. We all laughed at her puckered face when she bit into the first one, and then harder when she stubbornly bit the second. All berries are not created equal, dear child.

  I glanced at Drew’s door at the top of the stairs, wishing he would join us but knowing he would more likely wait until the kitchen was empty before he poured himself a mug of coffee, blacker and more manly than my own, and carried it back upstairs to drink in front of his computer.

  Hershey and I did a quick search of the front and back porch, looking for signs of anything out of place. Then I spread out the plans for the workshop on the table and erased the window. Every window I’d ever seen in a shop was covered over with stacks of lumber or shelves of nails. We would have electricity out there for overhead lights, and in order to get the riding lawn mower in I’d put a garage door at one end to let in plenty of sunlight. Besides, I was nervous about framing windows and doors. One less would make everything easier. The lumber was already on site, wrapped in plastic ribbons like an enormous gift. Building the shop would be perfect practice, like framing a mini house.

  Drew finally came down for a cup of coffee and stood over my shoulder with it, looking at the plans we’d drawn on the back of Jada’s math homework.

  “Want to try out that nail gun today?” I asked, expecting him to resist.

  “Sure. What time?” he asked, standing taller.

  “Let’s get dressed and go. Nothing else to do around here today.”

  The kids dressed in construction clothes and old coats faster than I’d ever seen them get ready for school. I wondered if they would be so anxious to pick up a hammer a month from now, or six months. The novelty would wear off for all of us, but hopefully our determination would not. If they gave up, I couldn’t finish on my own. No plan B. No way out.

  The city wouldn’t let me put in my own temporary electrical pole, which was probably a good call on their part. So I called an electrician who promised to do it cheap if I picked up the parts and had everything waiting for him. I’d done my part, even securing the box to the pole and using a post-hole digger to put it in place—a job I’d rather not repeat anytime soon, in the red clay with more quartz rock per square inch than there were chips in Hope’s overloaded chocolate chip cookies. Weeks later, the electrician had delayed a dozen times, and we were left with no power to run our tools or lights.

  A generous neighbor, Timothy, had offered to let us run an extension cord down the hill, past his pond, and to his pump house to run any tools we needed until the pole was hooked up. Timothy was tall and lanky, a Yankee transplant who embraced Southern living so fully that he planted okra and black-eyed peas in his garden and even had a pseudo-Southern twang that made me smile for its precision and proper grammar. I had had no intention of taking him up on his kind offer, but on that cold December morning it’s exactly what we did. I plugged in the tiny air compressor I’d bought at a discount hardware store and fired it up. Drew hooked up the nail gun, eyes alight. I pretended to defer to him because he was the one who had read the instruction manual, but I was secretly as terrified of the wicked-looking gun as he was delighted. To him and every other fifteen-year-old boy on the planet, it looked more like a zombie-killing machine from a video game than it looked like hard work.

  Jada collected large rocks to make a fire ring at the back of the property, and Hope gathered sticks to make a fire. Roman filled a bucket with sweetgum balls to use as kindling. I hadn’t actually made a fire outdoors more than a couple of times in my life, but I had a pack of matches, a thick old phone book, and piles of determination. We needed a warm, central spot for breaks, a place that felt like a vacation, even if it only lasted minutes.

  I laid out the first shop wall, starting with a straight run that had no surprises. This phase of the build was called framing. I knew that much even if I didn’t know exactly how to do it. The frame of a house would actually be better described as the skeleton. But skeletoning a house sounds too much like a horror novelist’s verb, so nailing together all the rib-like boards that hide insi
de the walls is called framing instead. I started with a sixteen-foot-long two-by-four that would become the top of a wall. Every sixteen inches I marked the edge of it with a penciled “X.” Then I made a matching one for the bottom of the wall, laid the two of them on the concrete slab eight feet apart, and ran eight-foot two-by-fours between them. The workshop was large, thirteen by thirty-three, so we’d have plenty of long, straight stretches to practice.

  “These two-by-fours suck,” Drew said, helping me line them up with each “X” on the bottom plate. “Look at that one, it’s twisted like a ribbon, and full of knots.”

  “Yeah. They don’t even seem to be the same length. Do you think that matters?”

  He shrugged. “I think they just gave you the crappiest stuff they could find.”

  We nailed the first wall together and found that length did matter—a lot. “We’ll have to take it apart,” I said, “and trim them all to the same length.”

  He started measuring and decided on the length we would use, marking each board with his new neon-orange construction pencil. “Are you sure you ordered the right wood?” he asked.

  And of course I wasn’t. There wasn’t a single part of this project that I was sure of. “I said two-by-fours. The salesperson asked ‘Eight-foot?’ and I said yes.”

  Drew started in with the nail gun, both of us jumping a little with each shot, and me terrified that he would put one through my legs as I knelt on the wall to hold the crooked boards in place with my weight. Even through our fears, we were grinning like fools.

  “Looks perfect!” he said.

  I held back on the victory dance. “Jada, come help us with the wall!”

  She stood at one end, Drew stood in the middle, and I stood at the end that needed to line up with the front of the slab. We heaved the wall up, little Jada pushing with all her might, leaning forward until she was a diagonal line, braces glinting in the sunlight. It was exhilarating. We were powerful heroes who had created a recognizable wall from a pile of mismatched sticks. The wall wobbled and undulated in a strong gust of wind, reminding us that we were human after all. Drew nailed the first brace in place. I put washers over the bolts sticking out of the slab and tightened nuts over them. Then we stood in a line off the slab, Roman on my hip and the older kids next to me, admiring a job well done.

  “We can do this,” I said, relieved and energized. “There’s the proof.” As though framing one basic wall was proof of anything more than our determination. But it was a lot more rewarding than the concrete work had been. It rose above the ground like a living thing.

  “Can we have a fire now?” Hope asked. “Roman’s pants need to be dried out.”

  “Marshmallows!” Roman shouted, a campfire image he’d gotten from television rather than a real-life marshmallow roast.

  I knew it took a lot of courage for Hope to ask. When she was five, an obsidian candle holder had exploded on our dining-room table, and the wax pool had ignited across the surface. It had taken only seconds for me to put it out, but it remained part of Hope’s psyche forever. She wouldn’t go to fireworks displays and paced in worry circles if I lit too many candles at once. Before that day, an open fire in an outdoor pit would have been just crazy talk to her.

  She had constructed a pyramid of small sticks over crumpled phone-book pages. Any Boy Scout would have been impressed. I lit a match and held it to the “P” page. Prim, Primble, and Prime were licked away by the orange tongue. I had expected to need most of the matchbook for our first fire, but that tiny flame was all it took. Jada handed me branches as big around as my wrist and a thick log with damp fungus along one side.

  Hope stuck long branches in the ground outside the fire’s ring and hung Roman’s pants and socks from them. “Poor lonely pants, with nobody inside them,” I said, quoting from a favorite Dr. Seuss story that had always scared my kids into a tight snuggle at bedtime. Roman giggled at the pants and poked the muddy thighs with a stick. They wiggled and danced, making him giggle more. He was already wearing his backup clothes. With all the puddles on site he would be rotating hourly from one outfit to the other. He had plastic bags between his socks and shoes but clearly needed a pair of rubber boots. It was yet another way we were unprepared for the reality of a job site.

  We framed the entire workshop by that afternoon, including a thirty-six-inch entry door but excluding the garage door. I wanted to read more about that before we tried to build the heavy header to go over the top of it. In addition to the braces nailed to stakes out in the yard, we cross-braced the walls with long two-by-fours nailed from the top of one wall down to the bottom of the other. I had no idea how sturdy it was without the rafters, so I wasn’t taking any chances.

  The hollow structure was long and narrow. “It looks like a ship,” I said when we all stood back to admire the work.

  “Like a whale, with the ribs and everything,” Jada said. “A whale with his head chopped off.”

  “Chop. Chop. Chop.” Roman whacked a spindly branch against the two-by-fours at the front corner.

  I held my breath, worried that we couldn’t possibly have done it, built something solid enough to stand up to a two-year-old. But the shop held up to his chopping, and to a strong wind that blew a pile of leaves into a whirling dervish. I closed my eyes and smiled. It was the first time I had built something so much larger than myself.

  Roman threw his stick down and rubbed his eyes. A low whine led into a wide yawn. He had been pulled past his endurance point after another day he would have described as one of the best of his life if he had the words. Mud, rocks, sticks, and two-year-olds are the best of pals.

  I found a pattern for rafters that night and an example of how to draw a chalk template on the slab so each rafter could be laid out, matched up, and built identical to the last. It was a great method, and it was too bad I hadn’t read about it in time to use it. Our slab was crisscrossed with a network of braces that we didn’t dare take down.

  The next morning, Drew and I modified the idea by pounding stakes into the ground for a rough template. I made what felt like hundreds of diagonal cuts for the crosspieces, and he nailed them together. Later I would learn that we’d used twice as much lumber as we needed to, building a roof that would take a ten-foot snow load. It may have been sturdy, but it wasn’t anywhere near perfectly straight.

  I eyeballed the surface we’d need to cover with four-by-eight sheets of plywood. “It ain’t no church,” I said. It had been my dad’s saying whenever a project strayed just left of perfection.

  “More importantly,” Drew added, “it isn’t my room.”

  The next day, I met a guy named Pete at the lumberyard near a mountain of two-by-fours. He was stocky with red hair and cheeks, a fireplug of a guy tucking away a pinch of mint tobacco. He was born right in Little Rock and had never left the state. “Don’t see a reason anyone should leave a perfectly good state,” he said. I learned this and a lot more because he had absolutely no rules about personal space. He was also overflowing with building tips and personal information that crossed all lines of oversharing. We traded project stories and he gave me his card in case we needed a hand along the way. (I’ve no idea what clues he’d picked up on that suggested we might have one building emergency or another.)

  I tucked his number away with no intention of calling a stranger in to our family project. But when he explained the ordering error that had made framing our shop a hundred times more difficult because of the shoddy boards, he won me over. Best of all, he was the first person I’d encountered who believed I could build a house without a hint of a loan-officer smirk. In short, I liked him.

  “Those eight-foot two-by-fours is for scrap stuff. Like building a frame for concrete, nothing that matters much if you run up on a twist or bubble. Cheap, but you can’t use ’em for framing. No one does that.” He laced his fingers together over the top of his little potbelly, much in the way a pregnant woman might. “Biggest problem if you frame with ’em is they’re near eight-foot long.�
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  If, he had said. If you frame with ’em. At least he hadn’t said if you’re stupid enough to frame with ’em. Because by my reddening cheeks and averted eyes he must have guessed by now that we had done exactly that. “That’s right though, isn’t it? A ceiling is eight foot; so is Sheetrock and plywood. So the two-by-fours should be eight foot, too. Shouldn’t they?”

  “You got a top and bottom plate. Don’t forget. Use an eight-foot board an’ nothing will fit right. Too tall. A dead-on stud is what you use for framing. It’s ninety-two’n five-eighths, not ninety-six. Top and bottom plate make it add up right.”

  Well, that was perfectly obvious. At least, it was now. Why I hadn’t thought of it before was beyond stupid. Because I had nothing to lose at this point, and because I was growing accustomed to looking like an idiot, I asked, “So if a person did use them to frame something, like maybe a shop, what would they do to fix it?” I looked at the toes of my shoes, expecting to see my courage seeping out in a puddle right there on aisle twenty-three. “I mean aside from ripping it out and starting over?”

  “For a shop I wouldn’t rip nothing apart. You got some extra work though. Need to cut strips of plywood to make up the difference—put it at the top, under the eaves. Siding’ll cover it. But that won’t fall right either, so you’ll have an odd siding piece at the bottom, most likely. Inside’ll be the hardest to make right. Hang your paneling or chipboard, whatever you got planned, then I’d double up some one-by-fours for trim along the base. That’s what I’d do.”

  Thank everything that’s holy I hadn’t ordered the lumber for the entire house yet. I also thanked Pete for his help and we shook, though he seemed tempted to hug me like a long-lost relative he’d finally found between the treated lumber and the eight-foot two-by-four not-studs.