How to Build a House (15 page)

I’d say, “Thanks.”

Five words from Tess. One from me.

There was the time our U.S. History classes were joined for a one-day project. There was the time we were assigned to the same Saturday college-essay-writing workshop.

I stopped seeing Jane. I rebuffed her invitations to lunch, or the movies, or shoe shopping.

Too much homework. I’m watching Cole. I have other plans
.

Any excuse other than
I can’t face you because you remind me of too many betrayals
.

Dad tried talking to me. I never told him anything other than I just wanted him to leave me alone, that things with Tess were hard, that he couldn’t possibly understand.

But no matter what happens, the earth keeps turning.

Monday always comes and eventually, sometimes excruciatingly slowly, that Monday is followed by a Friday. You take tests and hand in papers you wrote at two in the morning the day they were due, and your shoes get worn out, and the pollen in the air increases so that you go through an entire package of tissues during the SATs, and you wander through the crowds at parties looking for Natalie Banks because you came with her, and you watch her take off for the backyard with a senior who seems to be in the backyard with a different girl at every party, and you learn to play chess with your dad, and you eat too much ice cream, and your favorite television drama has its two-hour season finale, and then suddenly the school year ends and you pack your bags for Tennessee.

And that’s the end of the story.

STEP SIX:
THE ROOF

T
he summer after sixth grade I spent a month in New York City with my grandparents that flew by in a haze of melting sidewalks, Popsicles in Central Park and museum after museum. I loved sitting in the Egyptian wing of the Met. I loved cruising the design exhibit at MOMA. I loved the dizzying spiral walkway in the Guggenheim and how I could never know which floor we were on. But my favorite museum turned out to be the Frick on Fifth Avenue.

Half the reason to go to the Frick is to wander around the mansion. Now that I know a thing or two about building houses, I really appreciate the quality of the materials and the grand space. Henry Clay Frick made a fortune in steel, and after he built himself this mansion and decorated it with worldclass art, he died and left it all to the public. I’m guessing that really pissed off his heirs.

My grandmother and I went once a week and we’d check out the dining room and the library, sit in the garden, and before we’d leave, I’d visit my favorite painting:
Mistress and Maid
.

One young woman in a regal yellow gown, one in a brown sack dress. One beautiful, one plain. They stand at a small writing table, pen and paper ready. There’s an entire novel right there on the canvas in who these women are to each other, and how they got there.

I still remember part of the curator’s description:

There is an exceptional sense of dramatic tension in this painting of two women arrested in some moment of mysterious crisis
.

When I returned from New York, Tess had switched our beds around. Mine was now by the window. For years I’d complained about not getting enough fresh air or light in my corner of the room, but Tess wouldn’t budge. Now she’d gone and surprised me, and made my bed with perfect hospital corners and moved around our bedside tables and didn’t even try to pass off her lamp with the small burn mark on the shade as mine, and I knew that all of this was her way of telling me she’d missed me.

HERE

The roof is getting shingled today. It’s going to be brutal up there in this heat, and I’m hoping Linus has me inside working on the cabinets or maybe even painting.

Painting is one of the jobs nobody wants. You could go mad painting. Every wall and ceiling and inside every closet and all those corners and all that white primer and white paint, it just goes on forever, and you start to feel like you’re rolling away the contents of your brain with every stroke, but it’s got to be better than spending the day on the roof in hundred-degree heat.

Teddy picks me up for breakfast at his place and when we get back to his trailer, it’s empty.

“Surprise,” he says. He starts kissing me and we fall onto the couch. “The twins have doctor’s appointments in the city.” He throws some pillows to the floor. “Mom took them in for breakfast so they could beat rush-hour traffic.” He pulls off my T-shirt. “Dad had an early meeting with the school principal.”

“Teddy,” I whisper. He stops and looks at me. “Too much information.”

Later, when I’m in the bathroom, Teddy puts on the coffee and slides bread into the toaster. When I come out, smoke is filling the kitchen. He pops the toast and opens the small window over the sink and takes the butter out of the refrigerator, all as if this were the most natural thing in the world, making me breakfast after we’ve had sex on the couch.

Is this love?
I wonder.
Is this what it’s like? Does Teddy love me? Does pulling on his shorts and lacing up his boots before serving me burnt toast, half a grapefruit and a cup of decent coffee mean he loves me? And if so, why hasn’t he told me?

I don’t know what to expect, seeing as I’ve never had a boy tell me he loves me. Does he just say it? Does he pass me the boysenberry jam and say,
Would you like some jam for your toast, and by the way, I love you
?

No. He picks up the boysenberry jam, studies it and asks, “Have you ever had a fresh boysenberry? Or ever even seen a fresh boysenberry? Have you ever heard of anybody, ever, having eaten a fresh boysenberry?”

“Uh … no. I guess not.”

“Don’t you think that’s weird? I mean, you can’t find one jam aisle in any supermarket in this entire country without boysenberry jam in it, yet the existence of the actual boysenberry is questionable at best.”

“Astute observation.”

“Thanks. I think so too.”

We go out to meet the bus and I bring a piece of burnt toast for Frances, because I’ve noticed Frances has gotten into the habit of sleeping through breakfast.

She takes a bite. “You need to work on your homemaking skills if you plan on keeping Teddy.” Then she links her arm through his and they head up the path to the site.

Teddy and Frances are partners this week, and today they get the enviable job of building kitchen cabinets while I’m stuck with Seth on the dreaded roof, where it promises to be several degrees hotter than hell.

We have to seal the roof before we can shingle it, which means unfurling these huge, heavy black rolls of builders’ felt from one edge of the roof to the other. The felt smells like tar.

Unfortunately, I’m wearing a white lace bra (one of the by-products of having a boyfriend is thinking before choosing your bra), so I can’t take off my shirt like Marika and Marisol. They’re up here in their sports bras in what feels like some kind of cruel cosmic joke being played on Seth, who looks like he’s about to pass out. It’s probably just the heat. Seth isn’t even looking at Marika and Marisol. There’s an order to life. When you’re hungry you don’t worry about insignificant things, you think only of your hunger, and when you’re this hot, you don’t care that the two girls you’ve been stalking all summer are standing in front of you half naked.

Despite the heat, I keep running back over this morning’s conversation with Teddy and wondering if he’s ever going to tell me he loves me.

Marisol and I have taken over the eastern slope of the roof and left Seth and Marika to cover the western slope. She’s unrolling the builders’ felt; I’m tacking it to the roof.

“When did Pierre first tell you he loved you?” I ask.

She stops and takes the bandana off her head. She wipes her face as she thinks. I know she has the answer, but Marisol has a flair for the dramatic pause.

“The first afternoon we met. On the teen bike tour of Napa. He walked up to me and introduced himself and said that he was pretty sure he loved me, and if he hadn’t been so cute I would have thought he was a psycho. But that doesn’t really count, because, of course, he didn’t mean it.”

“So when did he tell you he loved you and mean it?” I nudge her to get back to rolling the felt, and I return to stapling it down.

“Probably the first time he tried talking me into having sex.”

“How romantic.”

She laughs. “Look, it didn’t really matter that much because I already knew. You just know these things. Don’t stress if Teddy hasn’t said it yet. Just look at how he treats you. He obviously loves you.”

“Really?”

“Totally.”

“But why?” We’ve reached the edge of the roof and we stop. From up here I can see that the countryside stretches on forever. Greens and browns and yellows and little patches of life, but mostly Earth: beautiful, undestroyed, pristine Earth.

“Are you seriously asking me why you’re worth loving? Are you
that
insecure?”

I don’t say anything.

“Okay. Where to start?” She sits down on the roll of felt and drinks from her water bottle. “To borrow a phrase from your native land, the inferior California to the south, you are,
like, totally awesome
. Not to mention the fact that you gave up your summer vacation to come down to this sweatbox and help his family rebuild their house. And finally, because I learned in my college-essay-writing workshop that all good arguments have three prongs, I offer this: You’re willing to put out.”

I smile at her and cock my head.

“Your school had one of those lame workshops too?”

“No. My overbearing parents sent me to a private workshop.”

“So that’s how they do it in the north,” I say. This time I give her more of a kick than a nudge. “C’mon, let’s get back to work.”

“Tell me more about Tess,” Teddy says.

The cicadas are buzzing. Tonight the sky is dark and deep, and we’re lying on a blanket in the grass on the hill where Teddy was planning on taking me to watch the fireworks on the night we first kissed in his truck.

I was just losing myself to the space between awake and gone, but now it’s like somebody turned on stadium lights out here.

I’m alert. Sleep is a distant continent.

“What do you want to know?”

“I don’t know. Anything. You know my family, but I hardly know a thing about yours.”

I stop and I let myself think about Tess, really think about her, and I find I’m unable to unearth the right words.

“She hates eggs,” I say.

“Really?”

“Yeah. The whole eating an embryo thing just rubs her the wrong way. Strangely, she has no problem with the full-grown chicken.”

“Well, that’s important to know. Thanks for that information.”

He seems kind of hurt. Like I’m dodging the question. But I’m just trying to be
here
. I’m trying to stay here, on this hillside in the dark with Teddy, and not let myself go back home.

“Teddy. I told you about what she did with Gabriel. That says everything, doesn’t it?”

“Does it? Is that who she is? Someone who just does things to hurt you?”

I don’t have to think about this last question for very long.

“No. She was always pretty good to me. I mean … she shared everything with me. Her mother, her sister, even her father. I never felt like the outsider with Tess.”

I close my eyes, and I listen to the cicadas and an image comes to me: Tess in a blue-and-gold-striped soccer jersey, with mud on her knees and flushed cheeks.

“When we were nine we played in a soccer league and she was a much better player, much more coordinated and confident on the field, but when it came time for tryouts she purposely tripped over the ball and missed an easy shot on goal, and we both got put on the same midlevel team.”

I watch the nine-year-old Tess run away, farther and farther down the field.

“Maybe that was just because she didn’t want to get stuck playing with people she didn’t know.”

I open my eyes again and look at him. “That was part of it, I’m sure. But also I think she didn’t want me to feel I was a crappier player than she was. Back then I was passionate about soccer, even though I wasn’t very good at it.”

“Sounds like she’s a good sister.”

“Was.”

“All over some guy who you were better off without anyway?”

“She knew how hurt I’d be. She had to.”

He stretches his long arms back over his head. “Look, Harper, I’m obviously not a girl, so I’m a little out of my arena of expertise here, but isn’t it like a cardinal rule that girlfriends, especially sisters, don’t let guys get between them?”

“Yes. It is. And she broke it.”

“But so did you by letting that night be the end of everything.”

I’m quiet. A tickle lodges itself in the back of my throat.

“I don’t think you really get it. And why should you? You have your mother and your father and your sisters. You can’t be divorced out of any of those relationships.”

He sits up and starts to put on his sneakers. “If you think everything is easy for me, then I don’t think you know me at all,” he says.

“It’s not that, it’s just—”

“I’ve been through some pretty heavy shit myself. You know?”

I sit up and grab the laces out of his hands.

“I know. I’m sorry. You’re right. I know you’ve been through a lot. I don’t mean to make it sound like your life’s been easy. See? This is why I don’t like talking about my family. It turns me into this wallower, wading around in my own mess, blind to everything else around me.”

He’s stopped, frozen with his hands stuck out in front of him where he’d been holding his laces, and he’s looking at me in a way he’s never looked at me before, and for the first time since we kissed that night in his truck, I sense that he’s untouchable.

Silence settles in, but not one of our comfortable silences. I hold his gaze; I don’t want him to look away.

He breathes in finally, and his eyes regain their warmth and it feels like if I wanted to I could put my arms around him, but I don’t.

Instead I finish tying his shoelaces for him.

“I’m sorry, Teddy. I’m really sorry.”

He reaches out and strokes my hair. He takes my chin in his hand and turns my face back up to look at him.

“There’s things you can fix and things you can’t,” he says. “And I just think it’s a shame to walk away from the things you can fix.”