Chapter 13
Sawyer
The day after the boys were called to the principal’s office, it rains, hard enough that I have to put fence work on hold. Which is fine, because I need to put in some good time on the first Reclaimed House furniture order and start in on some of the indoor reno projects, if I want to get the house rehabbed sometime in this century.
I decide I’ll do the rehab work in the morning and then start in on coffee tables—which are outselling all my other products—in the afternoon.
The first order of business is the wall-to-wall carpeting in the living room. I think it was probably an attractive blue-gray when it was first installed, but it is more of a gray-brown now. A good cleaning would take care of that problem, but it’s also worn nearly to the weave in the heavily trafficked spots near the front door and the kitchen. So I start in one corner, pulling it back. Dust and something worse, some mildewy odor, rise as I separate it from the pad, and I have to go out to the garage to find goggles and a dust mask.
I’m hoping against hope—because it does happen sometimes—to discover that the crappy carpet was laid over hardwood floor, but no such luck. There’s just subflooring, although, thankfully, that’s in good condition. I set to work tearing up the carpet, the pad, the liner, and the tack strips, heaping the discards in a pile by the door. I’ll need to make a dump run later.
It’s dull, dusty work, but it’s also brain-dead, so I can muse on what happened yesterday at school. When I walked into that principal’s office, it threw me right back to my childhood and all the times I was the one in that hot seat. I wasn’t a bad kid, just easily distracted, at least in elementary school and junior high. Lots of pranks, not so different than the ones Madden and Jonah had orchestrated, although not usually for such a noble cause. Mine were more of the variety of ordering a hundred pizzas to be sent to the teachers’ lounge and billed to the high school’s activities account.
I’ve been sort of vaguely aware of this whole gender thing going on, kids going by a different sex than the one they’re born with, but this was the first time it had really crossed my path in a personal way. I hadn’t given it too much thought before, but if Jonah can be cool with it, I sure as fuck can. And I’m proud of my kid. If anything—and I kept my mouth shut, not wanting to get into it with Mr. McKibben—I think the principal had things backwards. It’s not Jonah being a bad influence on Madden, it’s Madden being a great influence on Jonah. But whatever. The point is, those kids are clearly going to be friends, which means…
Well, it means that there won’t be any way for me to stay away from Elle.
Plus, I don’t really want to stay away from her. She was pretty spectacular yesterday, standing up for my kid (and hers, too, of course, but that’s par for the course, right?). She’s petite, but she packs a punch, and yesterday when she lit into McKibben, her cheeks were pink, her hair coming loose in strands from a ponytail, and her eyes blazing. She was breathing hard, as one does in these situations, and I couldn’t take my eyes off her. When we left the office together, I wanted to kiss the hell out of her.
It’s time to admit it: I want to have sex with her again. In pretty much the worst way.
I try not to give too much thought to the question of why, of all people, she’s the one who makes me contemplate a redo…
Instead, I haul armfuls of carpet and rubber mat and those goddamn prickly little tack strips down to the garage. I pause to make myself a ham sandwich, then eat it standing up in the living room, thinking about next steps. I want to find some oak flooring. There’s a place I like in Seattle that salvages and resells reclaimed flooring, and I’ve gotten great stuff there in the past—boards with a lot of wear left in them, with their tongue-and-groove still intact so they’re relatively easy to install without a lot of extra joint-cutting. That would be the easiest. Or I could look for something with more of a story—boards coming out of a house where a family lived happily for years, or from an old dance floor, whatever. We’ll see. I’ll see how much time and energy I have.
I head down to my garage workshop and survey the stack of materials I’ve collected for the furniture work. If I do them in parallel, I have enough space to construct three tables pretty quickly, box them, and ship them. The catalog company does the collateral—the assembly instructions and all that.
I whistle as I work.
I haven’t whistled in a long, long time.