OCR Text |
Show In the face of my father's anger, my mother and I laughed. When the world was falling apart, my father cursing, the line no longer level, the board mis-cut, the bolt missing in the weeds, my mother and I would turn away from him, hide our faces in our sweatshirts or behind our gloves, and laugh as if he had moments before told us the funniest of jokes. Tears would well in our eyes, slide down our faces, dot the red dirt at our feet. I remember one moment in particular, a cold day in mid-winter when we were building the garage on our house in Virginia. I was fifteen and still content at that point in my life to be home with my family on the weekends helping my father with the latest project. So far that year we had redone both bathrooms, worked on the cars, and added insulation to the attic. Because it involved laying a foundation, framing a structure, and roofing, the garage was by far the biggest project. That day, we were nailing plywood to the frame, large sheets of wood that took all of us to hold in place. My father worked on the inside of the structure, while my mother and I stood on the mounds of dirt we had cleared for the foundation and held the sheets of wood against the two-by-fours with our combined body weight. Inside, my father cursed and screamed. Nothing would hold. Outside, I remember how my mother and I laughed until we couldn't breathe, each new curse met by another gale, our hands shaking against the walls, the wind scraping our cheeks and chins. In laughing, I hoped to keep the rest of the possibilities at bay, keep things light, a big joke, nothing that could actually harm me. Laughter would force the monsters to retreat to their caves. And when my mother joined in, there were two of us doing the 190 |