Eduardo's Arc

Chapter 91 of 115

The next morning Eduardo walked the flat ground with the rolled plan under his arm. Then he stopped. The new house would stand on the same lot as his father's house. The old place still slumped behind him. Its roof sagged. Its windows held broken glass and crossed boards. He could not build a vow on this ground while that stood there, watching. "We can't start," he told Kiersten. "Not with it still up. It'll be in every window. In every board we nail." Kiersten looked at the broken house for a long time. "Then it has to come down." Eduardo felt his hands go cold. He had burned the belt inside it. He had poured out the bottles. He had learned to cry on its porch. Tearing it down felt like tearing out his own ribs. "I don't know if I can," he said. "It's the only proof I changed." "It's not proof," Kiersten said. "It's a cage you painted." He drove to the church to ask Father. The priest stood sweeping the step. He did not slow his broom. Eduardo told him he could not knock down the house that made him. Father stopped sweeping. "You kept the room," he said. "Not the walls. The walls were never the room." He went back to his step. "Burn the orchard. Keep the fruit." Eduardo drove home with those words. Kiersten waited by the old porch with a crowbar in each hand. She held one out. He took it. They started at the porch rail. Eduardo pulled the first board. It came away with a crack. He braced for the grief. It did not fall on him. The board was just wood. Gray, soft, done. They worked all day. Kiersten pried the broken windows loose. Eduardo pulled the door off its hinges, the same door his father had slammed a thousand times. He carried it to the burn pile without looking at it twice. By dusk the walls leaned. He set his shoulder to a corner post. Kiersten set hers beside him. "Together," she said. They pushed. The old house groaned, then folded in on itself in a cloud of dust. The roof came down last. When the dust cleared, the lot was open sky and flat dirt. Eduardo stood in the quiet. His father's house was gone. The fear he thought lived in those walls had not come out. It had never been in the walls. Kiersten touched the locket at her throat. "Now there's room," she said. Eduardo nodded. He looked at the bare ground where two front doors would stand. The old shape was gone for good. In the morning they would dig the footings for the new one. "Tomorrow we dig," he said. "Together," Kiersten said. "Every board."