Three Sisters Finished the House He Left

The Monday it happened, I drove out to the lot before work the way I had every morning since July, with my coffee in the cup holder and my scrubs still folded on the seat.

I liked to stand on the new plywood deck for five minutes before I went in to clean teeth all day. I liked to look at the walls going up and say to myself, this is ours.

That morning I pulled onto the gravel and knew something was wrong before I shut the engine off. The lot was too quiet. There was no generator humming, no radio playing country music off the tailgate of somebody’s truck.

I got out and walked to the garage slab, where Jody’s crew kept their gear under a blue tarp every night. The tarp was folded on the concrete. Everything that had been under it was gone.

The compressor was gone. The hoses were gone. All four nail guns were gone, and the chop saw, and the saw table, and the big orange cooler the boys kept their lunches in.

What was left was a stack of yellow 2×6 studs, two bundles of plywood sheathing, and a half-built house. The back wall and one side wall stood up straight against the mountains. The rest was chalk lines on the subfloor.

I stood there a long time. The sun was just coming over the Swan Range and the frost was melting off the plywood in little dark patches. A magpie sat on the top plate of the back wall and looked at me.

Then I took out my phone and called my cousin Jody.

It rang five times and went to his voicemail. His voice sounded cheerful and young on the recording, the way it did when we were kids racing bikes down Grandma’s lane.

“Jody, it’s Raelynn,” I said. “I’m out at the house. Your stuff is gone. Call me back, please. I just need to know what’s going on.”

I went to work. I cleaned eleven mouths that day and smiled at every one of them. I checked my phone between each patient. He never called.

Six Years

To understand why my hands were shaking that day, you have to understand how long Tate and I had waited for that house.

Tate drives truck. He hauls freight out of Missoula and he is gone Monday to Friday most weeks, sometimes longer. I have been a dental hygienist at the same office in Kalispell since I was twenty-five.

For six years, we lived in a rented single-wide on somebody else’s land and put away every dollar we did not need. We did not take a vacation. We drove a car with two hundred thousand miles on it.

Two years ago, we bought one acre outside Kalispell, off a county road, with a view of the mountains and three big ponderosa pines along the back line. We paid cash for the land. That alone took everything we had saved for four years.

The house would be small. Three bedrooms, one bathroom and a half, about eleven hundred square feet on a full basement, with a one-car garage beside it. Nothing fancy. Tate drew it on a napkin before we ever paid a man to draw it properly.

The bank gave us a construction loan for most of the building, paid out in draws as each stage was finished and inspected. But the bank wanted our own money in first, and so did every man we hired.

That is where Jody came in.