Eduardo's Arc

Chapter 90 of 115

They cleared a flat spot of land the next week. Eduardo brought paper and a pencil. He had drawn houses before, but always alone, always his own. Now he stared at the blank sheet and felt his hand freeze. Every house he knew was his father's house. Rooms built to keep people apart. He had no picture of a home where two people stood level. "I don't know how to draw this," he said. "I keep sketching the old shape. One man's rooms with a guest in them." Kiersten sat beside him on a stump. "Then don't draw it alone." "I'll build the same thing I always build," he said. His voice went tight. "I don't know what a house for two equals looks like. I never saw one." She took the pencil from his hand. She did not argue. She drew a wide porch across the front. Two doors, side by side. "One's yours," she said. "One's mine. They open to the same room." Eduardo watched her draw. He felt the old pull to take the pencil back, to fix her lines, to decide. He set the pull down. He let her keep the pencil. "We're scared of the same thing," Kiersten said. She kept drawing. "You think you'll ruin it. I think it'll end before it starts." "Yes." "My mother had nothing. People took from her all her life. She still said grace over a near-empty plate." Kiersten looked up. "She was grateful before the good came. Not after." Eduardo was quiet. He thought of the belt he had burned. The bottles he had poured out. The years he spent proving he was no one's fool. "God gave us this chance," she said. "Not the past. Not what was done to us. This. What we choose now is ours." She drew tall windows with shutters. A second floor. A peaked roof with trim like lace. It was not a plain box to hide in. It was a house someone would build on purpose, out of love. "A Victorian," Eduardo said. He almost smiled. "That's a lot of house." "It's a vow," Kiersten said. "You said no part of your father in it. So we build something he never would." Eduardo took the pencil when she offered it. This time he did not seize it. He added a railing to the porch. He asked her first where it should turn. She told him. He drew it her way. They worked past dark. The drawing filled the page. A warm, tall house with two front doors and room for two voices. Not his pattern. Not a monument. A home they both could point to and say they made it. "We build this one," Eduardo said. "Together," Kiersten said. "Every board." He rolled the paper carefully. The old house still stood empty behind them. In front of them lay flat ground and a plan that belonged to them both. For the first time he knew what to build.