The Place

First published 17 January 2024

We started on the house when the land it’s on was an uncleared lot. Mom purchased it using money from the sale of her father’s property and she had decided that she was going to save me from a perceived laziness by dragging me to help her clear it. Armed with clippers and gloves, we slashed through brambles and branches in 35 degree (C, 95 F) heat, the trees shielding us only just under their dry late-summer leaves. It could have been fun if she had approached it a different way, I think, but instead she bullied me into it with insults and threats, resulting in a stony silence from me throughout the entire miserable afternoon. I think she had meant it as a bonding activity but it did the opposite, driving the wedge between us ever deeper. The season turned and the girls and I went back to school but Daniel and mom continued clearing the lot. After tackling the brush, they took chainsaws and felled the pines and oaks that stood there. Some of the timber they took to the local sawmill and had sawed into boards and some they milled themselves. Matthew was away at his freshman year of university but we (the girls) began to get pulled in. I would drive us there after school and we would do odd jobs until I went home and made us all dinner which I would then drive back over to them. In addition to my normal cooking duty, I took on grocery shopping for the family and running errands to various hardware stores in between the hours I spent after school tutoring math. Throughout the spring, the foundation went down and the walls and the roof went up. Daniel and I wrapped the house together—we took what were basically huge rolls of plastic and stapled them around the outside of the bare posts of the walls to make the inside windproof and insulated. We nailed in the siding together, leaving the roof as the only thing to construct. And that we did: Daniel and Mom laying down one side and Mom and I the other, carrying long, unwieldy sheets of aluminum up a ladder and screwing them into the bracing below. Mom hired an electrician to do the wiring and we built the attic. 

One Wednesday evening after church, I brought my friend X out to see the construction project. He and Daniel got to chatting and X mentioned an opening at the construction company he was working for in Hot Springs. Daniel interviewed and got the position. 

Daniel was spiraling out of control at that point, stealing money from Mom and buying and selling and taking drugs. He had been spiraling for years at this point and it was like watching a train wreck unfold. He was in university but I was doing all of his homework, a deal he would buy me fast food for every Friday—a welcome time away from Mom with my erratic, funny older brother whom I was deeply worried about but had no idea how to help. I was worried about him but had thought maybe the house and job were helping, giving him something productive to do. He was engaged and his fiancé was pregnant, although I think maybe he was only engaged because his fiancé was pregnant. The tragedy of our family all came to a head early in the morning on May 28, 2016 when, while either texting or asleep or drunk/high at the wheel, he crashed his small sedan into an SUV while speeding on a dangerous highway on his way to the job that I had connected him with and died on impact. 

Something inside me stopped that day but the seasons kept turning, the humid rains of late May giving way again to relentless heat. We had to finish the house by October when Tessa and Daniel’s baby was due. Ignoring my cousin Jessica’s suggestion to hide crystals in the walls to protect the baby, we helped Mom put up the last of the inside walls, tucking insulation behind long sheets of plasterboard that we nailed in place with guns. I taped the seams and mudded them smooth with trowel and knife, layering it on extra thick on the places where the wall warped around the beams Mom had milled herself. We painted the outside of the house a cheery blue, the color diametrically opposed to how things were going. We were all grieving but no one was talking about it, each of us stewing in our own silent sorrow and the collective unspoken resentment of having our time and energy commandeered for a project that none of us had signed on for. We sweltered and sweated and seethed our way through that interminable summer, every nail we pounded into the walls fraying our relationship with Mom that much more. 

In August Matthew retreated back to university, reluctantly promising our parents that he wouldn’t drop out and revoke his scholarships. I was starting to apply for colleges and scholarships myself and I was burning out while trying to balance studying and tutoring and writing admissions essays and spending my after-school hours at the construction site which we referred to as “The Place” with varying degrees of vitriol. I was falling apart and I was terrified. I had no idea what was happening to me or how to fix it. Normally a voracious reader, I now couldn’t read a single sentence because I couldn’t remember what I was reading. I couldn’t make the words stick in my mind. It was difficult to retain consciousness and I was sleeping all the time. There were times when I physically couldn’t keep my eyes open. Grief wiped part of me away and I was operating on such reduced cognition that I thought I myself might be dying. It worried my mom enough that she took me to the doctor, something she hadn’t even done when I fell off my bike as a kid while speeding down a hill, lost consciousness and had to be driven back to our house by a concerned neighbor. The doctor took a blood test and then gently suggested that I might be depressed. But there was no time to be depressed—the house had to be finished.

Mom bought stacks of cedar boards and, donning face mask and goggles, I set to cutting grooves in them so that they would fit together as a floor. We sanded them down and nailed them into place, sanding them again with heavy floor sanders that made my body vibrate as I pushed them slowly along the floor, before painting polish onto them. We glued tiles to the bathroom floors with thick coatings of grout and screwed cabinets into the kitchen, lowering a sink into it. The time came for Tessa to give birth and she informed my parents of her plan to write another man’s name on the baby’s birth certificate. My parents barged into the hospital room where she was still recovering and demanded that she take a paternity test. She refused and told them not to speak to her again, blocking us all on social media. I don’t blame her in the slightest—being a parent on your own at 22 is terrifying enough without having to navigate overbearing and entitled in-laws. Tessa not moving in meant that the deadline for the house was no longer so tight but winter was approaching. We rushed to wrap up the odds and ends on the house until it was finally ready for Ethan and his wife to move into just before their birthdays in November. Slowly we finished the last touches and cleared the construction chaos from the house and yard. We added furniture and planted a garden. It was a real, actual house now--ready for someone to move into.

Was it worth it, I wondered, standing in the empty house. 

The house project majorly cracked my parent’s marriage, with Dad resenting the demand on his time and labor perhaps the most out of all of us. The house project destroyed Matthew and Mom’s relationship and resentment over it was just one more event contributing to my yearning to escape my relationships with my parents. 

My mom has always believed that we owe her for our lives and that she is entitled to our time, money, labor, obedience, etc over our own growth as people. While I’ll never condone that lack of respect, after seven years have passed since the completion of the house, I can see the positives. I learned valuable skills and I contributed to a structure that will live longer than I will. I’m happy that my brother has a place to live. Painful as it was, I’m happy for the ways that it cracked my family apart, allowing us to free ourselves from a cycle that’s been perpetuated through the generations.

Most of all, I’m happy that we all have a monument to Daniel, something that he added the best of himself to.