Outside the Ordinary World Read Online Free PDF Page A

first, friends came up to marvel at our fortune—how could we get this place at such a price? All we had to do was shore up some plaster, replace a few cabinets, rebuild the porch. Nathan estimated the work would take six months, a year tops. We took out a loan. We hired some friends.
    Over the months, as the work got deeper and more involved, as Nathan uncovered the insufficient framing, the knob-and-tube wiring, the stream that ran beneath the basement floor, we started to wonder what we’d gotten into. What we’d envisioned as a simple face-lift quickly became major reconstructive surgery, then morphed into what Nathan called a “total gut.” The money ran out, friends went back to their lives and Nathan had to return to his hateful government job.
    Now he works on the house during those precious chinks of time between parenting and full-time city planning. He goes on Wednesdays and weekends, and sometimes the girls and I tag along. For the first few years, it was fun meandering through hardware stores, dreaming over paint chips, learning to run trim. Hannah could wield a hammer by age six and was adept at using a cordless drill and level by eight. After she turned ten and realized that her dad might never finish the house—that she might never inhabit the cozy dormered room with its secret stairway to the attic—she became disinterested in carpentry altogether, and she and I would come up just to roam through our woods or walk to the pond for a swim. By then, we had Emmie, who is four now, and still too young to don a tool belt.
    Still, we make the forty-minute drive every Sunday, except in the foulest weather, hauling ice chests and picnic blankets, our swimsuits in summer and fleece vests in fall, our blueprints and sandwiches and all the other accoutrements of hope. We go to give Nathan moral support, to experience the thrill of walking on our own acreage, of standing inside the shell of what could, someday, be our home. We go despite Nathan’s and my ongoing battles—my desire to borrow more money, hire out the work and be done, always losing to Nathan’s exacting pride, his refusal to let anyone tamper with his masterpiece. “How would you feel if I hired someone to finish one of your paintings?” he always asks. I’ve finally stopped pointing out that we don’t someday hope to live inside one of my paintings, because I’ve realized that the house is Nathan’s only creative outlet.
    The foundation is repaired now, the framing shored up and the house rewired. We can’t use the stairs to our bedrooms yet, but we can stand inside the vacant, whitewashed kitchen, pretending to warm our hands at the imaginary woodstove, gazing through the bay window at the view—a view that reminds me, each time, of the one from my grandparents’ house in California; a view I want to breathe and bathe in, almost worth the frustration of endless waiting, the growing divide, the slow unraveling of expectation that is our family life.
     
     
    That July Sunday, the girls and I, sick to death of waiting for Nathan to conclude his struggle with the sliding glass doors, decided to walk to the market. Nathan had requested a coffee, and Hannah needed balm for her peeling lips. Emmie craved a chocolate doughnut and I wanted nothing more than to be done with the whole damn thing—the blueprints and the bickering, the Dumpsters and even the fourteen-acre wood, which was full of blackflies and mosquitoes that morning.
    Tai was sitting at the counter in the Ashfield Market, sipping black coffee and reading the paper, and if Emmie hadn’t careened into his stool, spattering his coffee all over herself and him, we might not have said a word to each other. Isn’t that the way these things often go—an accident, a chance encounter? You might call it a turn of fate—the architecture of destiny—if you’re inclined toward the romantic. Either way, it’s the oldest story I know.
    At the time, it just felt like another irritation: