Chapter 6
Punch List
Here’s a thing they don’t put on the mommy blogs: a woman six weeks postpartum with a twin bed, a treadmill full of coats, and no paycheck does some math at two in the morning that has nothing to do with feeding schedules.
Marsh & Sons is still paying my leave. Which means Lorraine is still paying my leave, which means every direct deposit is a hand on my shoulder, and I want it off.
My six-week checkup came back clean. Cleared for exercise and other activities for which I currently have no candidates and one restraining thought. The doctor said everything’s healing nicely. I thanked her and did not say: not everything, but the part you handle is.
So Monday, while Gracie sleeps twelve minutes of her contractually obligated forty-five, I make three calls.
Four years running that office bought me something nobody itemized: every general contractor in three counties knows my voice.
I’m the one who got their permits unstuck when the county lost the drainage plan.
I’m the one who caught the flipped digits in the pool guy’s setbacks before the county did.
Twice a year, like clockwork, one of them would lean on my counter and say, mostly joking, if you ever leave this circus, and I’d say, mostly joking, buy a bigger counter.
First call: the drywall king of the tri-county area. I get four sentences in before he interrupts.
“Wait. You’re out? You’re taking work?”
“Permit packages, expediting, closeout files. Per job, my rates, from home.”
“Dani.” A sound like a man putting his feet up. “I’ve got a stalled commercial re-roof and an inspector who hates my superintendent’s personality, which, fair. When can you start?”
“Friday.”
Second call goes the same. Third call, the man says thank God twice and then, suspicious, “Does Lorraine know you’re doing this?”—because everybody knows the weather patterns around here.
“She will,” I say, “when she gets my invoice.”
He laughs so hard he has to put the phone down.
In my mother’s stories the wronged wife always got a makeover montage.
New hair, new city, a convertible, some monogrammed luggage going into the trunk in slow motion.
Mine is a folding table from Beth’s garage set up under the window, a laminated county fee schedule, and a nap schedule taped to the wall. I have never once looked better.
Tuesday, Beth keeps Gracie for an hour while I drive to the re-roof.
The superintendent with the personality can’t find the approved drawings.
I stay in the detached site office—clean, quiet, outside the active work zone—and find them in six minutes.
A man the size of a garage door glances at Gracie on my lock screen and goes soft as flan.
“That the new inspector?” he says.
“Stricter,” I say. “She docks you for tone.”
Wednesday the pool guy calls in a panic because the county red-tagged his fence height.
I fix it from Beth’s porch in nineteen minutes with a variance form he didn’t know existed.
He says, reverent, what do I owe you, and I tell him, and he doesn’t even haggle.
Four years of Lorraine telling the office my salary was generous for the market.
The market, it turns out, had other numbers in mind.
I work naps and nights. I build the re-roof a closeout binder so clean the inspector signs off without climbing the ladder past the second rung.
The drywall king tells the pool guy, and the pool guy tells two more, and by the end of the week my phone’s doing a thing it’s never done before: ringing for me.
The nights are the real shift. Gracie eats at ten and one and four, and I’ve learned to review a permit set one-handed by phone light, red pen in my teeth, her jaw working steadily against me.
Somewhere in there she’s started doing the real smile—not gas, the genuine article, whole face involved—and she does it at me now.
Me, specifically, first thing, like I’m the best thing she’s seen all morning.
Beth got one too and called it a pity smile.
Beth watches all this from the kitchen with her arms crossed, proud and loud about it.
“You know what you are?” she says. “You’re a permit doula.”
“Absolutely not.”
“You’re doing exactly what you do for a baby. You take the paperwork somebody’s terrified of and you make the county dilate.”
“Beth.”
“I’m putting it on a mug.”
Evan comes Saturday for his visit, shirt still creased from the package, and holds his daughter for the length of a nap while I work at the folding table.
It’s civil. It’s careful. Nobody performs anything.
But when he brings her back in, milk-drunk against his shoulder, he stops next to the table.
County letterhead. Permit sets. My margin notes in my handwriting, which he could pick out of a lineup.
“You’re doing it,” he says. Quiet. “The shingle.”
Because I used to say it—someday, my own shingle, Foss Permits & Closeout—back when it was a joke I told at his family’s dinner table and everybody chuckled into the au gratin like I’d said someday I’d learn the flute.
Everybody but Evan, who never laughed, who always said she’d run this county in two years, tops—usually right into the silence his mother left for it.
“Somebody freed up my schedule,” I say.
He nods. Takes the hit fair, the first thing he’s taken fair in a month, and I make a small note in a file I’m not ready to name yet.
He puts Gracie down without waking her—a skill, an honest skill, the man could burgle a NICU—and at the door, cap in hand, he says: “Mom’s telling people you’re consulting. Consulting for the family firm. On leave.”
“Of course she is.”
“I told Cole the truth.” A pause. “Which is that you left the circus and the circus should be worried.”
That’s the second thing he’s taken fair, and he didn’t even take it—he threw it. The file I’m not ready to name gets another line item.
Sunday night the week closes out with two deliveries.
First, my phone lights up: Lorraine. Coffee this week, sweetheart? Just us girls. There are matters to discuss. Six words in, matters, and my whole neck knows it’s not coffee. I don’t answer. Let the county lose her drainage plan for once.
Second, I finish the invoice.
I built the template myself after Gracie’s ten o’clock feed. INVOICE #001, which looks silly and feels like a flag on a summit. Services rendered, permit expediting and closeout, re-roof at the commercial address, my rates, net fifteen. And across the top, in eighteen-point type:
DANI FOSS.
In Archer. The font I asked to use on the Marsh letterhead four years ago, the one Lorraine vetoed with a little laugh because we’ve always used what we’ve always used, sweetheart, and I said sure, of course, and changed it back, and that was the day the seat in that office got adjusted to fit me instead of the other way around.
Archer, eighteen point, my maiden name, net fifteen.
I hit send, and somewhere out there the drywall king’s bookkeeper opens tomorrow to the prettiest invoice in the tri-county area. I sit back in Beth’s kitchen with the fan ticking overhead and my daughter breathing in the next room.
Tonight, the math at two in the morning is mine.