How to Build a House (11 page)

“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

T
eddy 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.

Graceland is all about the inside, about Elvis’s over-the-top decor. Stained-glass peacock windows, a fifteen-foot-long sofa, a television room with three screens and blue and gold lightning bolts on the wall, the poolroom covered in tapestry, the jungle room with a green shag-carpeted ceiling.

When you walk out of the house at the end of the tour and you look back at it, you’d swear it’s an optical illusion.

It feels much larger than it looks, but that’s because he filled the place up with his gigantic personality.

Graceland is a cartoon. A bad joke. At least that’s how it feels to me after weeks of contemplating the simplest things a house needs: a room for cooking, a room for sitting, some rooms for sleeping. A tornado-safe room to run to. A place to live that’s rooted to the ground and won’t get hauled away when your FEMA grant runs out.

We share one of Elvis’s favorite fried-banana and peanut-butter sandwiches before getting back in the truck and heading into the city.

We park downtown and take a long, lazy late-afternoon walk. We pass the Lorraine Motel where Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated, which is now the National Civil Rights Museum.

We walk up a pedestrian street with a trolley that runs down its center. Beautiful old brick buildings crowd next to each other, many with empty storefronts.

There aren’t any people around. Maybe it’s the heat. Or maybe they’ve all gone somewhere else. Moved on. Used up all this city had to offer.

We walk down to the banks of the Mississippi River and sit. The grass is tall. Bugs are circling us.

I remember learning to spell Mississippi.

Mi-ssi-ssi-ppi
.

“A kid died jumping in right here on a dare last August,” Teddy says, and shakes his head. “It doesn’t look like it, but there can be a mean undercurrent.”

The Mississippi River.

It never sounded real. I couldn’t imagine something dividing this gigantic country in two. But here it is, muddy and brown. It isn’t even all that wide. I can see the edges of Arkansas. If we drove up and over the bridge, we’d be there in a matter of minutes. It’s a Saturday and there’s no traffic.

Somewhere beyond those edges of Arkansas is my home. If I could see forever, I’d be able to see its white trim and red door. I could see Dad sitting in the kitchen. Cole’s toys on the floor. Tess’s empty bed.

But it feels like I could never cross this river, even if I had an entire lifetime in which to do it. In some ways I’m farther away from home than I’ve ever been. An imaginary divider has gone up, splitting this country and my life in two, bigger and wider and stronger than the Mississippi.

And I can’t get back to the other side because I can’t climb something that can’t be climbed or swim across something that can’t be survived on a dare.

Now I understand where all the people went: Beale Street.

Teddy takes my hand. It’s the first time I’ve ever walked down a street holding the hand of someone who is not my parent.

It’s only a little past four in the afternoon, but already people are stumbling around drunk, spilling neon-colored frozen alcoholic sludge from their forty-two-ounce plastic cups. The clubs are packed. Blues music falls out one door, country out another. From a courtyard I hear a really bad reggae version of “Piece of My Heart” by Janis Joplin.

Teddy leans over and shouts in my ear,
“So whaddya think?”

What am I supposed to say? I hate it here. It’s loud and bright and hot, and it feels totally phony, like we’re at the Disneyland version of Memphis. The people here could vomit at any minute, and the cops on horseback look really mean.

“Isn’t it awful?”
he shouts.

I look around and suddenly everything’s perfect. I want to find a postcard, a T-shirt, some memento of this spot and this moment.

We walk off the main strip and wind our way along a few tree-lined blocks until we come to a little restaurant on a corner. He holds open the door for me.

We slide into a booth of blue and white vinyl.

It’s dark and cool. The walls are wood paneled and covered with old black-and-white photographs. Sawdust lines the floor. There’s a small stage with a piano, a stand-up bass and a drum kit at the far end of the restaurant.

A large black woman with dangling gold earrings and an apron comes over to greet us.

“Welcome to Alicia’s. Y’all hungry?”

“Yes, ma’am,” says Teddy.

“All right then,” she says with a smile, and walks off.

“Um,” I say, “are we going to order?”

“We just did,” he says. “She’ll bring us whatever she’s cooking today, and trust me, it’s going to knock your socks off.” He rubs his hands together.

“Even better than the Burrito Barn?”

“Even better than the Burrito Barn.” He smiles. He gestures to the stage. “The music’ll start around six-thirty or so, and until then, we’re going to sit here and eat some killer food, and you’re going to tell me everything I need to know about you.”

“Okay, well, for starters, I hate talking about myself.”

“Tell me something I don’t know.”

It’s quiet in here. Hushed conversations. It feels like secrets are hanging from the coatrack.

Before I stop to think I blurt out, “I’m not a virgin.”

“Okay,” he says. “I guess that’s getting right to the heart of things.”

“I’m not sure why I just told you that.”

“Because it’s important. I’m glad you did. For the record, I’m not either.”

“Amber?” I ask.

“How’d you know that?”

I give him a look that says,
How do you think I know?

“Ahhh,” he says. “Alice.”

I nod.

“And you? Gabriel, right?”

How does he know? I certainly never said anything about Gabriel to bigmouth Alice.

“Captain,” he says. “I had to do a little background research before getting up the courage to put the moves on you.”

I smile.

“Is everything over with him?” he asks. “Or is he wasting his summer on one of those famous California beaches waiting for you to come home?”

“I don’t even think he knows I’m here.”

“So then it’s over.”

“It never really began.”

“What happened?”

“That’s a long story.”

“We’ve got until six-thirty,” he says. “Then the band comes in and musicians don’t like it much when people talk through their set.”

Alicia brings us two glasses of water and a basket of corn muffins.

“How ’bout a shot of Jack Daniel’s?” Teddy asks her.

She laughs. “How ’bout you grow up a few good years,” she says, and walks away.

He smiles at me. “Can’t hurt to try.” He takes a sip of his water. “So tell me about this Gabriel person.”

“Why don’t you tell me about Amber first.”

“Oh, I don’t know. She was okay. I don’t think her daddy liked me much, so we didn’t spend time around her place. We were together at school. And we went to parties. She introduced me to Jack Daniel’s.” He smiles and nods toward the bar. “I guess it seemed fine to be with her when all that high school stuff mattered to me. After the tornado, things changed. I didn’t care about parties. Or the prom. And she didn’t like that I didn’t care. Not that I really blame her. She’s entitled to her last months of high school being carefree and fun. I just wasn’t the fun kind of boyfriend anymore.”

I reach across the table and take his hand. I notice for the first time that he bites his fingernails.

“She’s going to school next year in Alabama, where she can’t wait to pledge a sorority. Her birthday is in February and she’s allergic to shellfish. Okay. That’s enough about her. Tell me about Gabriel.”

“I don’t really know where to start. We’re friends. Or we were. But we were also more. It never quite felt right between us. And then it just felt plain miserable when Tess entered the picture.”

“Your sister?”

“Well, she’s kind of my sister. Or she was. See? I told you it’s a long story.”

“So get talking.”

I tell him everything. I go back to what I told him that day by the pool, when he brought me the pie, but this time I don’t leave anything out. I tell him about how my real mother died when I was two. I tell him about Jane and the June Gloom picnic at the beach when we first met and how Tess and I grew up sharing a room and sharing clothes and how now we barely speak. I tell him about the hand-to-breast incident of eighth grade and the teary back rub Gabriel gave me after Tess moved out and how that turned into more. I tell him about my dad and what Tess finally told me about him and why she wouldn’t go near our house anymore.

HOME

I ran away.

I ran from the tennis courts, back past the pool house, up the lawn, through Sabrina Christiansen’s mansion and down the winding streets sardined with fancy cars.

I climbed in my front seat and sat. I had my hands on the steering wheel, but I didn’t put the key into the ignition.

There was a knock at the passenger window.

Tess’s face looked lovelier than ever. Her cheeks were flushed. (Were they flushed from chasing me down or from whatever it was she had been doing with Gabriel?) Her hair was in a loose ponytail. Her shirt was Indian print, billowing, with open buttons at the top through which you could see her freckled chest.

She climbed into the car.

“You look really pissed off.”

“How … how … how could you?”

“I thought things were just casual with you and Gabriel. And anyway, I thought they were over. I mean, he was going out with Sarah Denton and you didn’t seem to care.”

“Well, things weren’t over. And they weren’t casual.”

“Shit, Harper. How am I supposed to know that? Really? How am I supposed to know about what’s happening in your life when you never tell me anything?”

“And that’s
my
fault?”

“It sort of is, yes.”

“You’re a bitch.”

I’d never talked to Tess like that before. At that moment in my car, with me behind the steering wheel and Tess with her mouth hanging open, something occurred to me for the very first time.