Three Sisters Finished the House He Left

Annika’s Hands

I have to tell you about that second Saturday afternoon, because it is one of the things I will remember when I am old.

About three o’clock, I cut my hand on the corner of a metal strap. It was not deep, but it bled the way hand cuts do, all over my glove and the stud I was holding.

Annika put down her nailer without a word and walked over. She pulled off my glove, looked at it, and took a little kit out of the truck. She cleaned it and closed it with strips and wrapped it, and the whole time her hands were steady as a clock.

“You’ll live,” she said.

Then she held onto my hand a second longer than she needed to. “You know Dad would be out here if he could,” she said quietly. “It’s killing him.”

“I know.”

“So we finish it. For him, too.”

I nodded. She let go, picked up her nailer and went back to work. I stood there with my wrapped hand and watched my big sister frame a bedroom wall for my house, and I had to look at the mountains for a minute.

The Third Saturday

The third Saturday was the kind of September day you get maybe four times a year in the Flathead. The sky was hard blue. The tamaracks on the mountains were just starting to turn gold. By noon it was warm enough that we took off our coats.

I wore my gray hoodie and my tool belt and my pink ball cap with my ponytail pulled through the back. Annika wore a blue plaid flannel and Mira a red-and-black buffalo plaid, sleeves rolled up. All three of us had sawdust in our hair by ten in the morning.

We had one wall left. It was the last section of the gable end, the wall that would face the mountains, with the big window over where the kitchen table would go. It was the window I had wanted most.

We built it flat on the deck the way we had learned. Plates, studs, cripples, king and jack studs, a doubled header over the window. Annika checked every measurement twice. Mira nailed the sheathing off in a straight line like she was plating dinner rolls.

About three in the afternoon, it was ready. The sun was bright and low enough to throw long shadows across the subfloor. I pushed my sunglasses up on my cap and looked at my sisters.

“Ready?” Mira said.

“Ready,” Annika said.

We counted out loud like we always did. I took the near end and pushed it up from my knees, then my waist, then over my head. Annika and Mira lifted the far end together, their flannel sleeves rolled to the elbow, their faces red from the effort.

I was grinning. I could not help it. I could feel the whole weight of that wall come off my arms and settle into the bottom plate, and I knew before Annika put the level on it that it was right.

“Plumb,” she said.

That was the last of it. One hundred and forty feet of wall in three Saturdays. Every stud, every header, every corner.