Three Sisters Finished the House He Left

Dad’s Nail

We were still standing there, catching our breath, when we heard a truck on the gravel.

It was Dad’s old pickup. Mom was driving, which she never does. Dad was in the passenger seat, and he had his hand up on the dash like he was trying to make the truck go faster.

Annika went straight to the truck in her nurse walk. “Dad,” she said, “you are not climbing anything.”

“I’m not climbing,” he said. “I’m walking up a plank. Your mother already gave me the speech.”

We had built a plank ramp up to the deck so we could wheel the compressor. Dad came up it slowly, one hand on Mom’s arm, the other holding his old framing hammer. It was the wooden-handled one with the grip worn smooth, the one he had used on every shed we ever built.

He walked the whole house. He did not say anything. He touched the corners. He ran his hand down a few studs. He looked through the big kitchen window at the mountains for a long time.

Then he came back to where we were standing by the last wall.

“There’s one nail left in this place I want,” he said.

Annika opened her mouth. Mom put a hand on her arm.

“One nail, Annika,” Mom said quietly. “Let him.”

Mira had left the top plate tie at the corner for last, where the gable wall met the side wall. Dad held out his hand. I put a sixteen-penny nail in his palm.

He set it with his thumb and finger. He tapped it once to start it. Then he drove it home in four clean strokes, the way he had shown us a hundred times in our backyard when we were small.

Nobody said a word. Then he set his hammer down on the top plate, put his arms around all three of us at once, and held on. I felt his chest shake against my shoulder, and I knew he was crying, and I did not look up because I did not want him to know I knew.

“My girls,” he said into my cap. “My girls built a house.”

Mom stood a few feet back with her hand over her mouth. Off on the county road, a truck that had slowed down to watch drove on very quietly.

The Trusses

The roof trusses came the following Tuesday. The truss company delivered them on a flatbed with a boom, and their crew set them in a single day while I was at work. I took my lunch break in the car and drove out just to watch.

The foreman shook my hand before he left. “Who framed your walls?” he asked.

“My sisters and me.”

He looked at me for a second. “Huh,” he said. “Good walls. Plumb and square. Made my job easy.”

Tate got home that Friday afternoon. He did not even go to the single-wide first. He drove straight to the lot in his work clothes and walked through every room of that house without saying a word.

When he came back out, he sat down on the lumber pile and put his face in his hands. I sat down beside him and he put his arm around me.

“I’m sorry I wasn’t here,” he said.

“You were,” I said. “You were in Rawlins and Denver and Salt Lake. That’s where you were. That’s why we still have a house.”