Chapter 8
Dion looked at the big sheet of paper, tracing his finger around the lines drawn on it. To me, all of this had felt like trying to read something written in code, but he seemed to understand it and he also seemed fascinated.
“There aren’t structural changes, which I like,” he told me. “That cabin is cool the way it is, and I wouldn’t want to mess with the character by doing something extreme, like trying to make it open-concept. What’s this?” He tapped one of the boxes.
“That’s how you draw empty space on a building plan,” I explained.
“I know that,” he retorted. “Is this the other closet off Theo’s bedroom, the one that was behind the dresser? It’s bigger than I thought.”
I had been curious about that too, and now I had answers.
Keon, my sister’s contractor, had already come and gone from the cabin (several times).
He’d sent out his draftsperson as well, to make sketches of everything so we could get an idea of what he thought should be done.
It was going to be a gigantic, expensive project, with new pipes (like Nicola had wanted), new wires, new lights, new toilets, new almost everything because all of the old stuff had broken down.
Not everything had actually broken, though.
In the case of most of the insulation, it had been eaten.
“We’ll save what we can,” Keon had told me as he’d eyed the big, sunshine-yellow refrigerator. “You know it’s not supposed to be making that noise.”
In the days prior to his arrival, it had started to sound a lot like a chainsaw, which I had also been hearing outside.
Theo had hired a crew to start removing some of the dead trees that threatened to fall on the house and were covered in hairy poison ivy vines.
One thing to note: you could still have a problem with poison ivy even when you didn’t see the leaves of three.
I scratched the rash on my leg as I looked at the building plan and decided that I definitely wasn’t going to wear shorts anymore, not until spring.
“Grace!”
“Yes?” I looked over at Dion. “What did you say?”
“You keep itching like a dog instead of paying attention,” he complained, which wasn’t true.
Obviously, I was scratching with my flexible fingers and dogs were forced to paw at themselves, which didn’t work nearly as well.
“What’s the purpose of this room?” He tapped his own flexible finger on the page, right on that small rectangle.
“Storage? An office? There are no windows.”
“Keon the contractor says that there was dead space that someone carved into an extra area. He says that the door and the room were added pretty recently, like in the past thirty or forty years and not when the house was built or in the renovation that happened in the nineteen fifties. He thought that maybe it was supposed to be a safe room, but I think that any criminal would have been able to see the door, just as well as we could. How would that be safe?”
“Did you go in there? Did you find anything good?” Dion looked excited but on the big clean-up day after Thanksgiving, he and his girlfriend had been in the kitchen serving and preparing food, and then going out to get more for us to eat and drink.
They hadn’t participated in the truly gross parts of emptying the house, so he had observed the issues but hadn’t been hands-on, and it was hard to put the utter nastiness into words.
But he’d told me that when he was a kid, he had lived in a place that wasn’t nice and I knew one thing he’d understand. “Rats,” I said succinctly, and his face changed to show revulsion.
“No, thank you,” he said, shaking his head. “No, no, no. Did you read everything that Nicola sent about wearing masks? You have gloves, right?”
“Yes, and the exterminator is coming again,” I answered. “Anyway, there were only plastic bins in the room instead of the cardboard boxes that I keep finding everywhere.” Cardboard didn’t stand up well to the water damage that I also kept finding. Vermin did like them, unfortunately.
“Like big, plastic totes? And? What was inside them?” he asked me.
“I just explained that there were a lot of rats,” I said patiently. “Theo told me not to touch anything, not until after the big clean-up of all the old insulation and all the old poop. And the fresh poop,” I added, and he shuddered.
“That’s repulsive. How can you deal with that?”
“You said that your house was worse,” I reminded him, and he answered that he didn’t live like that anymore.
“Carrington would faint if she saw rat shit,” he said fondly.
He smiled like he always did when he talked about his girlfriend.
“She probably wouldn’t recognize it, though.
She never lived that way, nothing like it.
She thinks that it’s a hardship if there’s no dishwasher in someone’s kitchen.
” He looked at the plans again but he frowned. “Sometimes it makes me worried.”
“You live with my mom, and I know for sure that there’s a dishwasher in her house,” I reassured him.
“No, I worry that I’m a guy who grew up with rat shit and she’s the girl who grew up taking weekend ski vacations. I’ve never been on skis and that whole sport seems batshit crazy. Why would you attach things to your feet that are long and slippery, especially when you’re up on a snowy mountain?”
I understood what he meant. “It’s fun, but it takes getting used to. You could try it and see for yourself.”
He seemed unconvinced.
“Even if you never like skiing, differences are good,” I said. “If Carrington was just the same as you, would you love her so much? She feels the same way.”
“I hope so,” he said fervently. “I hope she doesn’t start thinking that I’m as trashy as her mother keeps telling her.”
“What? You are not!” I exclaimed, and decided that I would sic Brenna on this problem. She was Dion’s biggest defender and if I were Carrington’s mom, I would have been scared of my sister coming at her.
He carefully rolled up the plans for the cabin. “Thanks for showing me these.”
“Thank you for looking,” I said. “I appreciate your expertise and I appreciate your shopping help. It was fun to come to your office, too.”
“Yeah? You and I have different ideas about what’s fun,” he told me, but he’d been really proud to show me around and introduce me to some of his coworkers.
“I’m his sister,” I had told them. “A new one.”
“What’s the plan?” Dion asked me now.
I pointed to the rolled documents but he shook his head, and I understood. “You mean for me,” I said. “You want to know my plan?”
“Yeah, Grace, what are you doing?”
“Right now I’m here in your office with you.
” That was pretty obvious, but sometimes it helped to start an explanation with the basics, just to clear up any underlying confusion.
“Next, I’m going to the cabin and I’ll work on removing the wallpaper in the dining room.
I’m actually just going to knock out the plaster, because I think that they used glue to put it up and scientists should track down that formula for building their interplanetary satellites. It’s that strong.”
“Knocking down plaster is going to be a mess,” he said, and reminded me to wear a mask.
“But I meant beyond that.” I started talking about getting takeout for dinner when he continued.
“The contractor will start the renovations in January, right? You can’t live in the cabin.
He’s going to bust shit up much worse than just a few plaster walls. ”
I nodded. I’d been thinking about it.
“So you’ll have to go somewhere else, both you and Theo,” he continued. “Are you going together? Then what? When the construction is over, are you going to keep living in the cabin with him? As his girlfriend? As his friend? Paying rent, doing chores, what?”
“I’ll have to get back to you on that.”
“That’s a job interview response,” he scoffed. “Addie told me to say it, but when are you supposed to get back to them? You’ll only have one round of interviews if you can’t come up with good answers to their questions. There won’t be any follow-up where you can to get back to them.”
Maybe Addie wasn’t the person to turn to for interview advice.
“Everyone keeps asking Sophie to dig up information on Theo but she can’t find anything bad,” Dion told me.
“There’s nothing to dig up!” I said. “Why do they want that?”
“Because they figure that there must be something wrong with him,” he explained. “Why else would he let you live with him, not paying anything and eating all his food? Even if you are doing some work—”
“A lot of work!” I interjected, and he waved his hand dismissively.
“It’s not for sex, right? No one’s criticizing you if it is, but they’re worried.”
“No, it’s not for sex. But I’m having trouble with that.”
“Is somebody bothering you?” He puffed out a little, but despite all the yoga and my mom’s good cooking, he was still pretty skinny. He didn’t look very intimidating, which I appreciated. I also appreciated that he cared.
“No, not really,” I answered. “I always just had a weird relationship with sex. In one way, I like it just fine and I don’t mind doing it, but in another way, I don’t like it at all and I wish everyone would leave me alone.”
“Are you talking about Theo?” he demanded. “Is he pressuring you? Hurting you?”
“No, of course not!”
“Yeah, he doesn’t seem like a guy who would do that. What are you saying, Grace? Don’t make me run to the group chat,” he threatened.
“Please don’t,” I requested. “They’ll all get upset.”
“About what?”
“About me!” I snapped, annoyed. “I’m tired of everyone being upset about me and I want them to stop. You stop, too.”