How to Build a House (5 page)

Tess is more fashionable. More feminine. Her shirts are always a little tighter and her shoes more delicate.

This shirt Tess wore was light pink and had snaps down the front that stopped right below her chest, and underneath she had on a gray ribbed tank top we’d bought together over the summer at this store on the Promenade. When Tess walked out of the dressing room, her long curly hair falling over her shoulders, the gray of the tank top somehow deepening the green in her eyes, she looked like a model. People in the store stopped to stare.

“What do you think?” she asked.

I lied. “You look okay.”

I turned and poked through a rack of on-sale summer skirts.

In the hallway at school I said, “I like your new shirt. It looks amazing on you.”

“Thanks,” she said, and we went to our next classes.

Everything had changed, and I’m not just talking about Dad and Jane. Or Tess moving out. Or how Cole would become my part-time little brother.

There was more.

Dad told me on a Thursday night. I’ll probably always question their decision to tell us separately.

I’d stayed after school for an environmental club meeting. When I got home, the house was quiet. Cole was in bed. Dad was in the kitchen alone.

“Where are Jane and Tess?”

“Out.”

If I hadn’t been so wrapped up in the argument we’d had over Alternative Energy Awareness Day, I might have noticed that Dad said “out” as if it took every ounce of life left in him to utter that one syllable. But it’s only because I know what came after that word that I can go back and attach meaning to the way it was spoken.

Dad at the counter. An empty Scotch glass with two almost-melted cubes of ice. A pad of paper with some sort of list scratched in Dad’s illegible scrawl. An unwashed dish in the sink.

Me, standing in front of the refrigerator. A bottle of Hank’s root beer to my lips. The agenda from my meeting, folded, in my other hand.

Then he said it.

“We’re getting a divorce.”

That would be when I dropped everything.

Remarkably, the bottle didn’t break.

In all the detail I remember about that moment, from Dad’s melting ice cubes to the sound of the soda glug-glugging out of the dropped glass bottle, I can scarcely remember anything that came after.

But here’s what I do know.

Here’s what I know that made the newness of Tess’s pink snap shirt insignificant, even though Tess shopping without me violated an unspoken rule of our sisterhood. As I stood there facing her that Monday morning after, and I told her that I liked her shirt, I was facing her with a secret.

Tess and I never kept secrets from each other.

Dad told me on a Thursday. Jane and Tess were at that very moment in a new house. I learned later that Jane had signed a lease on it a month before, and she had spent the weeks in between preparing for the move. By Friday night, Cole was there too.

On Saturday night, after years of imagining it, but knowing it should never happen, I did something neither Tess nor I had ever done.

I had sex.

With Gabriel.

HERE

I’ve been in Tennessee a week now. It’s Sunday and I’m supposed to call Dad.

Every Sunday. That’s our deal.

I’ve never gone a whole week without talking to Dad. And it feels like it’s been longer. That conversation on Linus’s cell phone in the heat outside the airport feels like it took place a lifetime ago between Dad and some other version of me.

I’m not trying to say I’ve been transformed. That spending a week in Tennessee on a construction site has made me a better, more evolved, selfless person who isn’t wrapped up in her own problems. Or that I’m suddenly confident. Strong. Able to erect new homes in a single bound.

It’s just that Dad and the sound of his voice feel very far away.

Yesterday was our first day off.

When I woke up at eleven o’clock, sweet, sweet eleven o’clock, I found most of the group out by the pool. What I saw when I looked around provided a tidy summation of our first week together.

1. Captain was rubbing sunblock onto Frances’s lower back.

2. Seth was sitting on the edge of Marika’s lounge chair, scrolling through his iPod picking out a song for her to listen to, while pretending he wasn’t checking out her string bikini. And she, kindly, pretended not to notice that he wouldn’t, despite the heat, remove his baggy white T-shirt and expose his boy boobs to the group.

3. Jared and Stacey, the first official couple of the summer, were in the pool. Their union became official, at least publicly so, when Linus threw open the door to the conference room after dinner Wednesday and found Stacey wrapped around Jared on one of the uncomfortable metal folding chairs.

(Technically, Jared and Stacey weren’t breaking any rules when Linus found them. The rules say when you have to be in your own room and who can and cannot be in there with you. Nothing about conference rooms.)

Luckily, the social scene here isn’t entirely about couples.

Take my fourth observation:

4. Marisol was sitting with Lana and her sister, Jo, already known as the Chicago Sisters, playing a game of Scrabble.

They let me join in.

In some universes you’d look like a total geek sitting by the pool playing Scrabble. But it doesn’t seem to matter here.

That evening the bus took us to a movie at a gigantic mall forty minutes away. I ate dinner with Marisol and Captain and Frances in the food court.

Frances had never eaten a meal in a mall in her life. “We don’t really have malls in the city.”

“The city,” said Captain. “Why does everybody from New York call it the city, as if it’s the only city in the entire world?”

“Because it’s the only one that matters,” said Frances.

Captain rolled his eyes.

I sat eating my salty french fries, thinking they had a very strange way of flirting with each other.

“So what brings you here?” I asked Frances. “To this mega-mall with really bad french fries in the middle of nowhere?”

“Just because I think New York is a superior place to live doesn’t mean I don’t care about what happens in the rest of the country.” Then she got a sheepish look on her face. “And my guidance counselor said it would help me get into Brown.”

“Ah, the truth,” said Captain. “She’s just as selfish and self-centered as your average dweller in the city.”

After we got back, and after lights-out, I heard doors creaking open and flip-flops on their way for another midnight swim. I heard Captain and Frances giggling in the hallway.

“Are you going?” I asked Marisol. She was lying in her bed across the room reading a book in Spanish that looked like it weighed fifty pounds.

“No. I’m not looking to hook up, so better to get my beauty sleep. What about you?”

“Well, now you’ve set me up. If I say I want to go, I’m saying I want to hook up.”

“By all means, don’t let me stop you from reaching your full slut potential. Why shouldn’t you? You’re not a nice Catholic girl like me.” She held up her crucifix.

“No, I’m not. But also I’m not looking for any more drama in my life. Anyway, I want to hear more about Pierre.”

Stories about a real boyfriend who writes you letters and misses you when you’re gone for the summer are as foreign to me as whatever was happening between the covers of Marisol’s Spanish novel.

We stayed up talking until two a.m.

And then this morning I wake up at eleven, and the first thing I think is that either Marisol succumbed to her guilt and went off to church, or else she failed miserably in her first attempt to sleep late, because she’s nowhere to be seen.

The second thing I think is that I have to call Dad.

He gave me a phone card that I shoved somewhere in my backpack. A phone card. It seems so quaint in the age of cell phones. When I go to dig for it, I feel something in the inside zippered pocket.

Oh, right. Dad. He told me about the thing in the inside zippered pocket.

Actually, it’s two things.

I can tell before I pull it out what the first one is. A picture in a frame. Dad and Cole. Cole is sitting on Dad’s lap, squinting at the camera, a Hot Wheels car in his hand. Pavlov lies next to them, his head resting on his black and white paws.

Before Cole was born, Dad liked to joke that in his house every night was Ladies’ Night. We outnumbered him four to one. He’d complain about the suffocating levels of estrogen, but we all knew he loved every minute of it.

Now I’m outnumbered three to one, if you count a border collie as a boy.

I take the picture and hold it close to my face to see it more clearly in this dark room. You couldn’t even tell where it was taken if you hadn’t been there. But I took the picture with my new digital camera, out in the backyard at the end of last summer, in front of the lavender bushes, about six weeks before Dad and Jane split up.

I’d been experimenting with close-ups. How to get a tight shot without the subjects going blurry. It worked. Dad and Cole and Pavlov fill up the frame, sharp and crisp, but when I look at this picture, I see little other than the small empty spaces at its edges.

I put it next to my bed on the table with the wobbly leg.

The other thing I find in my backpack is a bag of jelly beans.

When I was little, I hated when Dad had to go away. All kids hate when their parents go away, but I
really
hated it. Maybe you could even call it a phobia. I was terrified that something would happen to him, and I guess you don’t have to be Sigmund Freud to figure out where that came from.

So Dad would put one jelly bean into a little heart-shaped box for every night he’d be away. I’d eat one before bed, taking my time to choose just the right flavor, and think of him. And as they disappeared night after night, and I’d see how few were left, I’d know he’d be coming home soon.

I’m already a week behind on my jelly bean consumption, so I grab a handful and shove them in my mouth. It’s a better way to start the morning than with a cup of motel coffee.

The phone rings five times before Dad picks up.

It’s one of his weekends with Cole. Sunday-morning cartoons scream out from the background.

“Hey, honey!”

Dad sounds chipper. About one thousand times bigger than he did when I talked to him from the airport.

This makes me feel small. I’m standing out in the hallway, at the only pay phone, with no shoes on my feet and some serious bed-head.

“Hey,” I say.

“How’s Tennessee?”

“Hot.”

“Yeah, I bet. I don’t want to rub it in, but it is gorgeous here. Coley and I are thinking about hitting the beach. He’s got a new boogie board.”

Cole can barely swim.

Dad knows I’m a worrier, so he adds, “He likes to lie on it in the sand and have me drag him around.”

“Sounds like fun.”

“So, tell me more. What are you up to? Do you have friends? Will you be able to build me some shelves in my office when you get home?”

I’m alone. Maybe I slept too late. I don’t see anyone hanging around. This is how I wanted it. I was hoping for some privacy. I didn’t want to call home within earshot of anybody else.

“C’mon, Harper. Tell me something. Anything. Please?”

I tell him about the tornado. Its crazy path through this quiet countryside. The wrecked homes, and how some families just packed up and left. They gave up. I tell him about the Wrights, Diane and Wesley and the beautiful twins and skinny Teddy.

I tell him about how they stayed.

HERE

On Monday Teddy’s working at the site.

Homes from the Heart has a policy. If they come to build you a house, and they provide all these materials and all these laborers, even if the laborers are a bunch of teenagers, some of us quite lazy, you still have to help out. Which makes total sense. And since Diane runs the medical clinic and Wesley teaches summer school and the twins are only nine, the Wright family contribution falls to Teddy.

Teddy is my double-
y
partner for the week, and I’m missing Captain. I tried arguing with Linus. I told him what I learned in my Eastern philosophy elective last spring: that the yin is the dark, feminine, passive force and the yang is the bright, active, masculine force, and if he really knew anything about yin and yang he would know not only that Captain is the perfect yang to my yin, but also that it takes time for the two sides to figure out their roles, to really know each other’s strengths and weaknesses, and tearing us apart right now is counterproductive.

Linus was unmoved.

When Captain and I worked together we talked all day long. He talked to me about Marcy and Frances. I told him about Gabriel, making our relationship sound much more official or simple or real than it ever was, because here in Tennessee, sixteen hundred miles from home, I can make it anything I want it to be.

He didn’t ask me anything about my family.

Yin and yang. Perfect.

For the first hour, Teddy doesn’t say a word, which is just as well, because even though I don’t know him at all, I’m irritated with him for the simple reason that he’s not Captain.

He listens to an MP3 player that is not an iPod, which I’m pretty sure puts him in violation of a rule. Okay, so maybe it strictly states no iPods at the construction site, but as I mentioned, I’m a stickler. The spirit of the rule is that you aren’t supposed to have any kind of electronic listening device while working.

Maybe this is for safety purposes. Or to make sure we communicate and get to know each other better. In that case, I think it’s a stupid rule. You can’t force people to talk to each other if they aren’t interested. So, good for Teddy.

Sometime into the second hour Teddy takes out his earphones and puts his player into the pocket of his baggy shorts and he tilts back his baseball cap and he checks me out.

“Harper, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Sorry for the antisocial behavior. I’m working on this song and the only thing that helps me when I get stuck is listening to other people’s music, which is counterintuitive, I know, but what can I say? The creative process is a mystery.”