How to Build a House Read online

  He kisses each of us on the cheek, and so does Frances, and we say goodnight to them and tiptoe back to our room, where I go to bed and dream of invisible fireworks in an endless night sky.

  When I wake up I don’t remember where I am.

  The room has changed shape. The bathroom entrance is on the wrong wall and my bed is facing the opposite direction. The curtains aren’t right. It’s too dark. The smell is off.

  I sit up and shake my head, and slowly the room falls into place. Everything shifts around like pieces of an oversized jigsaw puzzle.

  This isn’t my room at home; it’s my motel room in Tennessee. The breathing I hear coming from the other bed is Marisol. It isn’t Tess.

  This is now. Today.

  I settle back into bed and pull up the covers. I don’t want to get up.

  Not just yet.

  I want to remember last night and kissing Teddy. I want to hang on to these precious minutes before the day begins and I see him again and all the confusion takes hold.

  We sat in his truck and he pulled me close. My face. My neck. My hair.

  It’s been a while. I haven’t been touched like that since the last time I was with Gabriel, and that was five months ago.

  Or maybe it’s been never.

  HOME

  It was early February. Sarah Denton was on the outs. I don’t know why, because Gabriel and I never talked about Sarah Denton, I just know that there was a party at her house and he didn’t want to go. We went to a movie instead. And then back to my house.

  Dad was out. It was Cole’s weekend at Jane’s.

  Afterward we threw our clothes on and went down into the kitchen and ate pistachio ice cream. The cold stole the flush from my cheeks.

  It was easy to see why Sarah Denton and all the other girls like Sarah Denton were drawn to Gabriel. He’d grown handsome. And sure of himself. He had a way of smiling and saying something playful, and with that look and those playful words he could make any awkwardness vanish.

  Sometimes it was hard for me to remember the younger version of Gabriel—my friend from Mr. Ratner’s math class, the movie geek with the ridiculous good-luck dance, who used to love comic-book heroes and dreamed of discovering he too had powers. Gabriel the Great, bigger and better and somehow more special than his average twelve-year-old self.

  But he had finally developed a power, or at least a power over me. He had the ability to make it seem as if everything were normal. He made it seem as if there were no questions to be asked about the nature of our relationship. We were friends. Sometimes we had sex. No big deal.

  I might think about asking him as we were lying there just after: What is this? Who am I to you? Do you even want me? Could I be just anybody?

  But then he’d deliver a big smile. An inside joke. Maybe a friendly shove. His way of saying: See, what’s so weird about any of this? And then I’d think maybe he was right. Maybe none of those questions mattered.

  In my kitchen, with the pistachio ice cream on the counter between us, I remember we talked about colleges. He was going on a trip with his father over spring break. Up and down the East Coast for interviews and tours. He wanted to go somewhere not too far outside a city. He wondered if when it came time to pack up and make the move, his car would survive the cross-country trip.

  There was nothing confusing, it was just talk.

  It was simple.

  And it was one of the last conversations we ever had.

  HERE

  Teddy is late to work.

  This isn’t like him. He’s usually here before we arrive, but today there’s no sign of him.

  Of course I assume the worst. He’s avoiding me.

  So when I feel a tap on my shoulder and turn to find myself staring into a small bouquet of wildflowers, their stems wrapped in tinfoil, I’m so shocked I jump back, like a hornet might be hiding in there. I guess another word for what I do is recoil, which is not really what you want to do when the boy you’re hot for hands you flowers.

  I take them.

  “Hey there,” he says. He digs his hands into the pockets of his baggy shorts and rolls back on this heels.

  “Hey there yourself,” I say, and immediately wish I’d said something smarter. “You’re late.”

  “I am.”

  We stare at each other. A saw grinds away in the distance.

  “Well,” I say, “now that we have that cleared up.”

  “I’m happy to see you,” he blurts out.

  I don’t know how to do this. This isn’t what I know. My limited experience with boys doesn’t include what is happening right now.

  But I manage a smile. And then I hand him a pencil.

  “Help me measure this,” I say, and we go back to work on the house that no longer looks like a skeleton. The walls are solid now.

  At the end of the day he asks if we can have dinner together. I wonder briefly if this is when he’s going to lay down the rules for whatever this is that’s going on between us.

  I’m not your boyfriend. This doesn’t mean anything.

  “Okay,” I say. “Pick me up at the motel.”

  “Skip the bus. You don’t need to change. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but the only restaurant in town is the Burrito Barn.” He looks me up and down. Takes in my army shorts and work boots and the pink T-shirt with Mr. Bubble on the front. “Currently,” he says, “you are way overdressed.”

  I get permission from Linus to skip the usual cookout by the pool, and I go tell Marisol not to save me a seat on the bus.

  “Hot date with your boyfriend?”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I do. You don’t want me to curse it. And that’s totally cool. I get it.”

  “Thanks.”

  “But I’m wondering … when does a guy turn from someone you’re just making out with into a bona fide boyfriend?”

  If I knew the answer to that question I could have spared myself months, years of confusion and angst. If I had the answer I’d bottle it and sell it and retire to a fat and happy life of doing nothing. I shrug.

  “Okay,” she says, and gives me a quick hug. “Have fun tonight. Remember every detail so we can overanalyze everything later when you come home.”

  “Okay.” I smile and then turn to leave.

  “And do me one more favor?”

  “What?”

  “Don’t let whatever happened back home with that other guy mess this up with you and Teddy, okay?”

  We sit outside at a picnic table. I never like eating outside in L.A., because no matter how many potted palms they surround you with, all you’re doing is breathing car exhaust. But the tables here sit off the side of a totally empty road. Teddy’s truck is the only vehicle in sight.

  We order from a chalkboard menu, and when they call our number, which seems an odd thing to do since we’re the only ones here, Teddy goes to retrieve our food.

  “Madam,” he says, and he bows as he puts an orange plastic tray in front of me. “Your supper has arrived.”

  It is hands down the worst burrito on the planet.

  I gently suggest this to Teddy.

  “Really? I think this place is pretty decent.”

  “That’s obviously because you know nothing about Mexican food. Come to L.A. sometime and I’ll show you real Mexican food.” I sound like a snob. I know it, but I can’t help myself.

  Teddy’s quiet, but that’s just because he has a mouthful of burrito. He swallows and breaks into a grin.

  “What? This isn’t authentic enough for you? Is it because the chef is a little old white lady named Myrtle who’s never left Bailey and has owned this place since back when it used to be known as the Burger Palace?” He wipes his mouth with a flimsy paper napkin.

  “The Burger Palace?”

  “Like I said, it’s the only restaurant in town, and people tend to get bored.”

  “Look, I don’t mean to rag on Myrtle but�
��and I’m just trying to be honest here—this burrito is abysmal. It actually makes me miss the motel food.”

  Teddy laughs.

  “I know another place,” he says. “Come on, let’s go.”

  They’re in the middle of dinner when we arrive, sitting around a plastic table under an awning in front of the trailer. Alice jumps up and gives me a hug. Grace waves and smiles at me.

  “Hey, Mama,” Teddy says. “Any scraps left for some hungry wanderers?”

  Coach Wes, as I’ve taken to calling him since that’s what everyone in town calls him, slaps his hands on the table. “Now, Teddy, I told you to bring her here in the first place. You know that old Myrtle Lavigne is losing her sight and her mind.”

  Diane gives Coach Wes a playful shove.

  “Of course there’s more food, honey. Have a seat.” She gets up and goes into the trailer and comes back with cold cucumber soup, corn bread and grilled chicken.

  “Were you guys on a date?” Alice asks.

  I go red. The kid is fearless.

  I busy myself with my soup.

  “Hush now,” says Coach Wes.

  “But Daddy, I—”

  “I said hush.”

  The dinner is delicious, and afterward I help Diane do the dishes over her strenuous objection. There’s barely room for the two of us in the kitchen. I dance around her, careful that we don’t crash into each other.

  The kitchen is also the dining area, but it wouldn’t be able to hold the whole family. It opens onto a small living room, where Teddy spends his nights on the couch.

  Coach Wes and Diane sleep in one tiny room and Alice and Grace share the other.

  As Diane hands me glasses and I dry them with a red-checkered cloth, I do some snooping. There’s a poster of Miles Davis taped to the wall. A few photographs on the shelf: Coach Wes with his football team. A shorter Teddy with bigger hair and the twins without their front teeth. An older couple I don’t recognize. That’s about it.

  I rub my hand along the armrest of the couch like I might be able to learn more about Teddy by touching the place where he goes to sleep at night.

  I know so little about him.

  I know that he graduated in June with the sun lighting up the school gym. I know that he got into the University of Texas in Austin (which he says has a killer music scene) but deferred. He wants to stay in Bailey and help rebuild the medical clinic. I know that he works hard. That he doesn’t goof off at the site like the rest of us do. I know that I love kissing him.

  I hand the dried glasses back to Diane. She puts them in the cupboard. I hear Teddy’s voice coming in through the open front door, followed by laughter. Big laughter.

  What makes him laugh like that?

  The conversation doesn’t happen, no talk of what we aren’t and what we cannot be. Ground rules are not set.

  Just more kissing in the truck before he drops me home, back at my motel.

  HOME

  It was the party of the year. Presidents’ Day weekend. Sabrina Christiansen’s parents were in Switzerland. She hired a DJ.

  Sabrina Christiansen lives in a Bel Air mansion that used to be owned by Mickey Rooney. He’s this short, old bald guy who was once a famous movie star.

  She has a pool and a tennis court and a pool house and probably even another house to go with the tennis court, but I never got that far.

  I almost didn’t go.

  Dad and I had a monster fight. He had something important that night and couldn’t find a babysitter for Cole. I told him I had something important too: Sabrina Christiansen’s party. He told me I went to parties every weekend. It wouldn’t kill me to skip one. I told him he didn’t understand. He told me I was being a drama queen.

  You get the picture.

  So I sulked and barely said a word to Dad for the two days leading up to the party and I made no plans to go with anyone.

  Then Saturday night rolled around and Dad surprised me with the news that he’d found someone who could watch Cole. It turned out he’d been making all kinds of calls in the pursuit of a trustworthy babysitter, and one finally came through at the last minute.

  I threw my arms around him and told him I loved him.

  He said, “I love you too, you selfish brat.”

  I drove alone. The rumor that there would be valet parking turned out not to be true, and I had to walk up a winding road with old-fashioned streetlamps.

  The moon was full.

  I ran into Natalie Banks as I was getting out of my car and we made the hike together, which was tougher on her because of her stiletto-heeled boots.

  We’d been in school together since kindergarten, but we’d never been more than casual friends. That didn’t mean I didn’t know things about her or that she didn’t know things about me. I knew that Natalie was on the volleyball team, that her father lived in England and that she’d lost her virginity to Dixon Michaels in the summer between eighth and ninth grade.

  “Where’s Tess?” she asked.

  So maybe Natalie didn’t know things about me.

  Or maybe news of my family’s implosion wasn’t nearly as big as I’d thought.

  Or maybe she was some kind of diabolical she-devil who thrived on other people’s discomfort.

  Or, to not assume the worst, maybe Natalie figured Tess and I were getting through all this with our friendship intact.

  “I’m not sure,” I said. “Probably at the party already. Probably by the keg. Probably being circled by ten different guys.”

  This was true about Tess. She drew tons of attention at parties. It had something to do with the confidence she’d pick up after a drink or two. The hot outfits she put together probably didn’t hurt either.

  Tess was a master flirt who rarely followed through. She liked to be courted. The only boys she’d ever fooled around with were ones who had pursued her for weeks. She was slow and careful, and this made what happened at Sabrina Christiansen’s party all the more shocking.

  I didn’t see her anywhere. After the first hour I figured she’d skipped the party. Maybe she had plans that night with Jane.

  I drank flat beer. I talked more with Natalie and this guy Ben who was in my history class. The DJ was playing eighties music, but I’m not much of a dancer.

  I walked down to the pool where people sat dangling their feet, and watched how the shimmering pool light made their faces look tanned and their teeth ultrawhite. I looked in the pool house, where the stoners were camped out doing bong hits.

  I wandered over to the tennis court. It was dark.

  I didn’t notice the couple making out in the grass just off the foul line until I almost tripped over them.

  And then they looked up at me. And the full moon lit their faces.

  Tess and Gabriel.

  STEP FIVE:

  WINDOWS AND DOORS

  Teddy and I are westbound on I-40.

  We’re rocking out to the sound of some new Jesus band. There’s an urgency to their love: Enthusiasm spills out like the drawing of a child who can’t keep his markers inside the lines.

  It’s Saturday. It’s hot and the air conditioner is straining the engine of Teddy’s truck. He’s wearing a black baseball cap and a white T-shirt and his hand is on my knee.

  This past week I partnered with Marisol. On Monday she smashed her thumb with a hammer, so she spent the rest of the week with it wrapped in a white gauze bandage, sitting off to the side, watching me work and distracting me with her constant chattering.

  Yesterday we anchored the back door. We needed Linus’s help because Marisol is pretty much useless. And also, doors are heavy.

  The door came prehung with jambs, a threshold and exterior trim, but we, or more accurately I, had to flash the doorsill before we could fit the door to the frame of the house. Proper flashing keeps out water and rot.

  I still can’t believe I know how to flash a doorsill. Me. I know how to flash a doorsill. Go figure.

  When I finished we called Linus over to help us lift
the door into place and he commented on my expert flashing. Felt along the sides and the top, aluminum on the bottom.

  “Excellent work,” he said as he smoothed his hands up and down the felt.

  “Thank you,” said Marisol.

  I glared at her.

  “Well, I told you when it looked crooked, didn’t I?”

  I turned to Linus. “Marisol’s using her minor thumb injury as a way of avoiding doing any real work.”

  “Harper’s using the bad luck of prior relationships to avoid accepting that she’s crazy in love with Teddy,” she shot back.

  I shoved her.

  “Ow,” she said. “Careful of my thumb.”

  Linus smiled at us both.

  “He’s a nice boy,” he said.

  Today this nice boy is taking me to Graceland.

  I’ve never been much of an Elvis fan. Though I can hum a few bars of “Hound Dog” and “Blue Suede Shoes.”

  “Remind me why we’re doing this?” I ask Teddy.

  “Because if we don’t, you’ll spend the rest of your life explaining how you could have spent a summer in a small town about an hour outside of Memphis and never gone to Graceland.”

  We were going to borrow Coach Wes’s car so we could take Marisol, Captain and Frances, but then Frances woke up with the flu, and Captain wanted to stay and take care of her, and Marisol didn’t want to be the third wheel. I told her that was ridiculous, but she still refused, and now I’m alone with Teddy.

  Graceland is a place for Elvis fanatics. Here you’ll find every detail about the King and his transformation from an eager, pretty-faced mama’s boy with a cheap guitar and self-conscious leg twitch, into a bejeweled, jumpsuit-wearing hedonist who looked like he’d been inflated with a bicycle pump.

  Graceland is both bigger and smaller than I imagined it.

  The mansion itself isn’t all that impressive from the outside. There are much, much larger houses all over Los Angeles. About ten Gracelands could fit into one of Sabrina Christiansen’s mansions.