Three Sisters Finished the House He Left

The Rule About Dad

There was one thing we settled before anything else. Dad was not coming up on that deck with a hammer.

“Dad,” Annika said in her nurse voice, the one that makes grown men sit back down in their hospital beds, “you had your chest opened five months ago. You are not lifting a wall. You are going to be our foreman, and you are going to do it from this table.”

He looked at the three of us for a long time. Then he picked up his pencil.

“Fine,” he said. “Then I want a cut list. Every stud, every plate, every header, every cripple. And I want a phone call every hour.”

Mom brought us coffee and then pie and then more coffee. At one point she stood behind Dad and put her hands on his shoulders, and I saw her look at the three of us with her eyes wet.

When we left, Dad walked us out to the porch. “Crown up,” he said. “Check your diagonals. Do not let anybody tell you that you can’t.”

I did not know yet that somebody already had.

What Jody Said

Mira told me that next Saturday morning while we were loading her truck.

“I didn’t want to say it in front of Dad,” she said. “But Jody was in the diner Thursday with two of his old crew. They were sitting at the counter. He didn’t see me in the back.”

“What did he say?”

She shut the tailgate harder than she needed to. “Somebody asked about your house. He said he was sorry about it, but you’d find somebody. And then he laughed and said, ‘It’s not like the Volk girls are going to finish it themselves.'”

I stood there in Mira’s driveway with my hand on her truck.

“He said that?”

“He said they could never finish it. Those words. The whole counter laughed.”

I did not say anything for a while. Then I said, “Well. Let’s go rent some nail guns.”

The First Saturday

We rented two framing nailers and a compressor from the rental place in Kalispell at seven in the morning. With the hoses and two boxes of nails, it came to $138 for the day. I put it on my debit card and did not let myself think about it.

By eight we were on the deck. It was a cold, clear morning. We could see our breath until almost nine, and the plywood was slick with frost in the shade of the back wall.

We started with the long side wall, the one facing the road. Thirty-six feet of it, with two windows and the front door. We snapped our lines, laid out our plates, and marked every sixteen inches with a pencil and a little X the way Dad had shown us.

The first stud I nailed, I missed the plate completely. The nail went sideways and stuck out the side like a porcupine quill. Mira laughed so hard she had to sit down on the lumber pile.

The second one went in clean. So did the third. By the twentieth, I had a rhythm, and the sound of the gun, that hard double knock, had started to feel like something I owned.

Every hour, on the hour, my phone rang. “Where are you?” Dad would say. “Read me your rough opening on that front window.”