44. Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-One
B ut as luck would have it, Nadine was wide awake by six in the morning. For more than twenty minutes, she repositioned: on her back, on her left side, then her right, trying to go back to sleep, remembering her promise to herself to sleep in. But she started thinking about the house and everything she wanted to do. There was so much she almost didn’t know where to start. But she remembered Maureen’s sage advice of taking one room at a time, and she decided she would tackle the next easiest room: another one of the bedrooms.
As her mother was still asleep, she decided to take Herman with her. After a quick breakfast, which she ate standing in front of the kitchen sink, she scribbled a hasty note and left it on the table .
It seemed the beautiful September weather had vanished overnight. The sky was gray and dull, and there was a mist rolling in off the lake.
She drove the short distance to her new home and let Herman out of the car, and together they trotted up the front steps.
It was a thrill that she owned a house of her own. That it was hers and hers alone. Thinking of it reminded her to get a will made once her divorce was final. Obviously, it would be left to Emma, and it made Nadine smile to think it would help her daughter to fulfill her dream of owning a house on the beach.
As soon as she arrived upstairs, she rolled up her sleeves and got to work. Ignoring the pile of debris on the floor, she moved on to the next bedroom. With the first swing of the hammer against the wall, the noise of the impact reverberated around the room, resulting in Herman giving his two cents’ worth with a few barks from the safety of the doorway.
For the rest of the morning, she removed trim and pulled down walls, taking the debris from the room and piling it with the rest. Despite the rain, she opened the upstairs windows and the balcony door, stepping outside from time to time to lower her mask and take some deep breaths.
Her phone pinged in her back pocket, and she pulled it out and read two texts from Maureen :
Dumpster will be delivered tomorrow morning between 9 and 12.
And then the second message:
Drywaller will be there to meet with you tomorrow at 5pm.
Gutting every room upstairs had taken a lot longer than she thought it would. For some unknown reason, using some magical formula known only to her, she had estimated it would take her a week to gut the upstairs bedrooms and hallway.
It had taken her seventeen days.
She bundled up the lath and tied it with string. Using a shovel, she moved the plaster debris from the floors of the bedrooms into industrial-sized garbage bags. But she soon found out she was unable to lift any of the bags weighing more than twenty- or twenty-five pounds high enough to heave them over the balcony into the dumpster.
The drywaller, a man named Mike, had come out and given her a price. She’d have to dip into her savings, but she didn’t care. There’d be brand-new walls at the end of it. As soon as she was finished gutting the upstairs, he would start, so she was anxious to get it done. From working morning to night, she managed to lose fifteen pounds .
Mike had also told her that his two college-aged boys were home for the weekend and were looking for some cash, and would be more than willing to clean up the upstairs under his supervision, including getting all the debris into the dumpster. Nadine jumped at the offer, thinking it would be money well spent.
Things were finally moving along.