by Terri Kraus
Ethan could only shake his head in reply. He wanted to tell her that the history of things should be respected. You should work around the quirks of a house. You could live with some odd corners. It’s what gives the house its charm, its character. You could manage your life around some of the “defects” of the past. It was important to have things as they should be, as they were, leaving the past to tell its story.
But instead of saying anything, he simply nodded.
She did, after all, sign the checks.
And, after all, Willis Construction really needed this job.
Ethan strapped on his tool belt.
He loved the feel of the hammer resting against his leg, the rattle of nails in the leather pouch, the clatter of tape measures and metal framing squares. Nail guns were faster and more efficient, but there was something alien about their popping hisses as compressed air drove nails into wood without benefit of hammer.
By noon, the crew had built new framing walls on the north side of a second-floor bedroom. Two small, original knee walls had been taken down, and two doorways were covered over in newer framing and plywood sheets.
“Lunchtime,” Joel called. His watch kept the official time for the crew. A short, stocky man, Joel was about as unflappable an assistant as Ethan could have hoped for. Ethan knew Joel would keep things running smoothly on the jobsite in his absence. Joel had an ability to manage the workers on the crew with a strong yet kind manner. And he was a gifted craftsman as well.
The crew all made their way down to the first floor, grabbing their coolers and lunch carriers. It looked as if there was an official cooler for the team; nearly every one carried the exact same model, in different colors and stages of being nicked and scarred.
They assembled on the front porch. Of all the details on the house, the porch was one that had scarcely been altered since the mid-1880s. Although the gingerbread details needed work, the wide, sweeping curves of the porch—as it graciously wrapped around the house—remained the same as drawn by the nineteenth-century architect.
They ate in silence. From the third floor came the booming bass of the radio that constantly played as they worked.
Ethan sat, reclining against the shingled wall, just under a massive bay window. He looked up as a small, sporty white car in need of a washing pulled close to the curb and stopped at an awkward angle, its front a little too close to the brick entrance pillars and its trunk sticking out a little too far into the street.
The entire crew looked up.
The door opened, and a young woman stepped out into the bright sunshine.
Ethan immediately recognized her—Cameron Dane from The Derrick.
The rest of the crew fell into a deeper silence as she walked up the uneven brick sidewalk.
“Hi!” she called out. “I knew you were probably too busy to call, so I thought I might as well stop by and ask you again.”
Ethan tried to swallow the bite of the salami sandwich in his mouth but found it wadded up at the top of his throat. He gulped again, then reached for his thermos.
Cameron stopped at the bottom of the steps. Her dark hair fell in relaxed curls around her shoulders. She was wearing black linen slacks that hung loose around her long legs, and a white blouse that might have been silk. Ethan imagined that even the stores at the new mall out toward Cranberry didn’t sell expensive blouses like that. The first three buttons were undone. She put one foot on the bottom step and rested her hands on her hips. She smiled again.
He did not remember her being quite so striking.
“So?” she asked again. “Did you decide?”
Ethan could feel the eyes of his crew darting from this woman to him and back to the woman again. He hoped he wouldn’t blush.
He swallowed again. “I didn’t have a lot of time to think about it … I mean …”
Instead of a scowl, which is what Ethan expected, she tilted her head back and laughed. He watched her expose her white, smooth throat, circled with a simple string of pearls.
“That might have sounded plausible in a phone message. But in person … it just doesn’t work.”
Ethan felt his crew staring at either the back of his head or at this woman.
“Well … I would need to talk to the owner of the house. She’s in California this week. It will have to wait until she gets back.”
Cameron offered her best happy, not-smug expression in reply. “I already spoke with her. ‘Call me CeCe,’ she said, ‘with two capital Cs.’ The editor of the paper knows her father … or uncle … or someone. I called her, and she was excited about the idea.”
He found himself smiling back, despite being scolded in a most pleasant manner. “Well,” he said, finally, “I suppose it would be fine. When?”
She shrugged. “You’re going to be here awhile—I know that much about construction. You’re not going to have any ‘after’ photo opportunities for a while, are you?”
“No. Not for several months at least.”
She looked happy that he had understood her verbal shorthand.
“Well, maybe we can do a two-part series with a long break between parts. Let’s schedule the first interview for next Monday. I’d do it this week, but I have to head back home to Philadelphia this afternoon for a few days. I hope next Monday works for you.”
“It does,” Ethan said, nodding.
She brightened.
“Then I’ll see you next Monday—about ten, okay?”
“Ten would be fine.”
She nodded, turned, and walked back to her car. Before she got in, she looked directly at Ethan and waved.
He almost waved back but nodded discreetly instead.
As she drove off, he could feel the hard stares of his entire crew—none of whom had said a single word during the entire exchange.
“She’s just a reporter. Wants to do a story on this old place.”
Joel shook his head in disbelief.
“About us? I don’t think I’d like that.”
“Not us. This house,” Ethan answered.
Some of the crew laughed.
“It ain’t the house she’s interested in, Willis. A monkey with a pipe wrench could tell you that it ain’t that at all.”
Ethan stood up abruptly. “It’s just a story. That’s all. She just wants a story on the restoration.” His words were not angry, but neither were they gentle.
He waited only a heartbeat until he turned and walked back inside, a full twenty minutes before their lunch break was over.
“So, you still up for camping this weekend?”
Ethan carried the dinner plates back to the sink. Most often the sink would collect dishes for a day or two, but Ethan, as of late, had made a concerted effort to keep the clutter down. Now he washed the dishes as soon as they were finished eating. Chase most often pitched in but today sat in his chair and slumped farther.
He shrugged.
“Not much of an answer,” Ethan replied harshly. “Do you want to go or not? No sense going if you’re going to mope around all weekend.”
Ethan tried to hold his anger in check. He was pretty certain that Chase was trying his best to hold his sullen mood in check as well.
“I dunno,” Chase said softly, looking away. “I guess we could go. Only weekend for a while with no ball games.”
Ethan and Chase had sat down weeks ago with the baseball schedule and calendar. During the entire summer, only four weekends did not have a game or practice or some other entanglement. Ethan did not like the excessive time demands but realized that the team gave his son a great outlet—an outlet that Ethan alone could not offer.
“You guess?”
Chase glared back this time.
“Okay. Sorry.”
Chase’s face softened. Ethan saw something in h
is eyes. It was not anger exactly, nor simply a sullen mood. It was something of loss, of emptiness, that flickered there, just out of his reach and understanding. It was the color of a gray afternoon in March, just before dark, under a cold, wet sky. He wondered if that veil had come upon his son that one unspeakable day so long ago.
Chase looked back at his father. “Yeah, we should go. To Lake Tionesta like you said, right?”
Ethan thought the words sounded hollow. But he also realized that Chase had made a move, no matter how slight. He blinked hard and tried his best to smile in return.
“Yeah, I think that’s a great spot. We can take the canoe.”
Chase nodded.
They had camped there several times last year, on the lake at the edge of the Allegheny National Forest. They had been nearly alone on the campground, and from the open tent flap they could have tossed a fishing line into the water, they were so close.
“Should I bring the big tent?” Ethan asked.
They had two tents—one an elaborate four-man affair with a porch and a few dozen poles and pegs. Ethan had bought the tent before he and Lynne were married. He’d anticipated children even before she had agreed to marry him. A year ago, he had purchased a smaller, two-man tent that could almost set itself up.
Ethan could not decide on which tent made him less uncomfortable. He still heard echoes of Lynne’s laughter in the large tent, and the small tent was a constant, silent statement that she would never be with them again.
He thought he would let his son decide.
“The small one is fine. It’s a lot easier to set up.”
Both paused.
“But the big one is more comfortable.”
Ethan nodded. He would decide later. “Firewood or Coleman stove?” he asked.
Chase bit his lower lip. “Firewood,” he said, but added quickly, “but take the stove if it looks like rain.”
Ethan recalled that their last trip had been marked with a steady, unrelenting drizzle. The nearest restaurant had been located over an hour away, so after two days of eating crackers and canned tuna, they had given up and headed home.
“Freeze-dried or fresh-caught?”
Chase let out an unexpected giggle. “Both. Please.”
Ethan played at being insulted. “You doubt my ability to catch fish? Have I ever failed us before?”
Ethan caught his son’s eye. When he saw Chase’s expression, he knew they were both remembering a trip last year when they had planned to live off the land. The fish must have heard them coming because it had taken them all day to catch two small perch, which, combined, were hardly enough for an appetizer.
“Good. I’ll get the tent and canoe ready. You gather up the food and your gear. I want to leave right after work on Friday.”
Chase nodded.
“But we need to get back on Sunday evening.”
Chase looked perplexed. Often they would stay through Monday morning. After all, Ethan was the owner of Willis Construction, and the position provided a few perks.
“There’s a reporter coming to interview me at the Old Carter Mansion Monday morning.”
“About what?”
Ethan shrugged. “About the restoration, I guess.”
Chase leaned forward out of his slouch. “That reporter from the ball game?”
Ethan was surprised Chase remembered. “Yes. The same one.”
There was a long pause, as if Chase was carefully measuring his words. “Sure. Okay. We can come home Sunday night.”
His words were as blank as an empty chalkboard in a shuttered classroom.
Chase said nothing more about the proposed story. The evening passed quickly. The Pittsburgh Pirates were playing a night game in Atlanta, and Chase watched several innings. He and his father didn’t exchange more than a dozen sentences.
Chase quietly left the room as his father began to snore from the depths of his leather recliner. He crept up the stairs to his room. For a long moment, he hesitated in his doorway. He listened to the gentle hum of the television and his father’s occasional soft snoring.
He didn’t turn the light on in his room. His antique pine bed, set at an angle in the corner, had been unmade now for several days running. His student-sized desk was nestled under the eaves. Since it was summer, the surface stayed clean, save for the latest Sports Illustrated.
Two low three-drawer chests sat on the wall opposite. His mother had found them along with a matching nightstand in a thrift store years earlier and had stripped them bare. She had planned to paint them. Now, seven years later, they all remained unpainted. Chase kept them in reasonable order, but several drawers were filled with a jumble of socks and underwear and batting gloves. One poster hung on the wall—this year’s Pittsburgh Pirates team photo. All the players and coaches were smiling at some point off to the left of the camera lens. Next to it was an eight-by-ten framed photo of the Franklin Flyers, sponsored by The Pizza Den. Chase, unsmiling and squinting into the sun, was in the last row in a number 14 baseball jersey.
He made his way in the dark and switched on the light in his closet. He pushed aside a neat row of clothes, all hung carefully on matching hangers, all notched in the same direction.
Behind the clothes was a rectangle of plywood, painted to match the wall, and trimmed with door molding. The frame was about half the size of a regular door. A handle jutted out on one side.
Chase slipped his fingers under the handle and pulled it toward him. A patch of darkness lay in front of him. He carefully laid the plywood rectangle to one side and reached into the dark, his fingers spread. He found the pull cord to the light switch and gently tugged at it. A small bulb filled the space with cool light. Chase ducked his head and entered.
The Willis house was 120 years old. His dad always said it was his best advertisement. Done in the Carpenter Gothic style, the large cottage had stood longer than most of the houses in Franklin. Chase knew well the story of how his family had acquired the house. His dad had always admired its cross gables, its ornate bargeboards adorning the gable ends of the roof, its windows with pointed arches, and its board and batten trim. When Dad and Mom were newlyweds, the old place had gone up for sale. It needed so much work that it was affordable for the young couple—a real “fixer-upper.” His dad had spent his nights and weekends lovingly restoring all the historic wooden exterior details. His mom had stripped the walls of over a century of wallpaper layers, and they had painted them in a palette of rich colors.
Dad had never fully finished the remodeling tasks Mom had planned—adding an island and moving a wall in the kitchen, putting up a chair rail and beadboard in the dining room—and now he didn’t seem to want to do it.
Chase shrugged. Guess with only Dad and him now, the remodeling was no longer important. The house had its share of quirks and odd spaces. Under the steep cross-gabled roof, a narrow cleft of unused storage space lay behind Chase’s second-floor bedroom—a tight, windowless hallway—or secret passageway—about fifteen feet long and four feet wide, with a low ceiling no more than five feet high. In it a small boy could stand and walk, but Chase now was too tall to walk without crouching.
Chase had pulled electrical wire from an outlet in his room and installed the pull light. A boy did not grow up in the home of a builder without learning some of the skills. He nailed in drywall along the exposed joists—in a jigsaw pattern—from scraps that he pulled from his father’s work sites. They were carefully snugged tight together but never taped and plastered. The pattern looked like a mosaic of sorts. The floor was covered with a plush thickness of dozens and dozens of carpet squares—free samples from past projects that his father had discarded. At the far end of this hidden hallway was an eyebrow vent, its louvers facing the west, at the back side of the house. Two summers ago he had painted the drywall using some paint also left over from another
old house his dad had worked on in town—a deep blue-green color, the color of the sea, the color of his mother’s eyes.
He was sure his father had forgotten that this room existed. Or maybe he hadn’t. Chase knew that even if his father remembered it, he would never invade this space without permission. They had that sort of a relationship.
Chase knelt and took a deep breath. He closed his eyes.
The walls were devoid of posters. The hall was decorated with a couple of old lawn chairs on one side, some beanbag chairs, and a dozen old pillows scattered about. A stack of old comic books and a few old Sports Illustrated magazines lay near the chairs. He walked to the far end and looked out the half-round louvers to the house next door. He turned and watched a car slowly cruise up their block.
Only he and Elliot ever entered this room. They had once talked about stringing wire between Elliot’s house and this room so they could carry on secret conversations. As of yet, that plan had not gone beyond the daydreaming stage.
The night had grown dark, and a low scud of clouds obscured the moon. It was as dark as the neighborhood got, Chase figured.
He bent to his knee and from an alcove extracted a wooden box the size of a small footlocker. He had built it out of bits and pieces of one-by-sixes that he found in his father’s truck. It had a hinged lid and a little clasping lock. He had once considered locking it but realized no one would ever tamper with his secret place.
He stared at the chest for a long moment. Then he opened the lid and paused for a long while. He didn’t know how much time had passed. He then reached in and gently felt along the edge of a white fabric. His expression didn’t change. He laid it back down and smoothed at the surface.
He pushed one corner to the side. He pulled out a folded paper and spread it open. It was the hockey schedule for the Franklin Oilers. It was seven years old. He refolded it and placed it back inside the box. Then he reached in and removed a Bible. The dark blue leather cover was creased and worn and had his mother’s maiden name embossed in gold on the bottom-right-hand corner. He opened the front cover and traced at the writing with his forefinger.