Jen Lancaster - If You Were Here

Then the judge addresses the rest of the court. “The defendant, Mia MacNamara, is free on her own recognizance but will make restitution to the town of Abington Cambs in the amount of fifteen hundred dollars. Case dismissed.”

He bangs his gavel and I’m free to go.

As soon as I figure out where to get fifteen hundred dollars.

But I did finish my book while in jail.

So there’s that.

“For what it’s worth, Kara’s not returning my calls, either,” Tracey tells me.

It’s been a week since I accidentally missed Kara’s come-to-Jesus meeting with her parents. In between my stays at the Abington Cambs jail, I’ve frantically tried to get hold of her so I can tell her how sorry I am. I even maxed out my credit card to send her an extravagant wine-and-flowers-and-chocolate care package, but I haven’t heard a peep back.

“I was going to go down to her place a few days ago and stake her out, but, you know, prison. I feel sick that she had to face her parents alone.”

“Mia, it wasn’t like you were trying to avoid her. This kind of thing happens.” She quickly amends that statement. “Wait, no. This kind of thing happens to you, I mean. No one else gets trapped by bathtubs. Anyway, Kara finally standing up to her folks may be exactly what she needed. I bet you inadvertently did her a favor.”

“If so, I sure wish I’d hear that from her,” I reply. “I’ll just add Kara to the list of things about which I’m panicking.”

“But you finished your book. Why are you stressed?”

“Apparently you forget I live in a barn.”

“Actually I kind of did. Are you ever sorry you decided to — cough notlistentome cough — I mean live up there and not just face ORNESTEGA and his band of idiots?”

“Lately? Every minute of every day,” I mournfully reply.“Things are not great. Our nerves are shot and we’re both overreacting to everything. Like last night, when we tried to mount a cabinet? I thought we were going to spontaneously burst into divorce.”

We’re both unbelievably sick of carryout, delivery, and hot dogs, so we decided we’d try to tackle the kitchen. First, Mac tried to do the cabinet bases himself, but the floor’s so uneven that he ran out of shims trying to get them level. So he decided we should change courses and try to work on hanging the cabinets again.

When we attempted this last week, the whole incident ended in tears because Mac didn’t know we weren’t supposed to hang them with the doors on, and they were so heavy I kept dropping them. Realizing his mistake, he thought we could do it this time, particularly if we used a ladder to help balance the load.

To mount a cabinet on the wall, a strong person needs to stand underneath while someone with good dexterity anchors the cabinet to the wall.

As it turns out, I am neither.

First, we put me underneath the cabinet, with part of the weight being supported by a ladder, but mostly by me holding it up like Atlas tried to hold up the world, while Mac dicked around with anchors and drill bits. By the time he’d finally load up his drill, my arms would get wobbly and I’d have to set the cabinet down.

Since he didn’t learn last time exactly how much I can benchpress, he decided it would be smart to bolt some of the cabinets together, so I wasn’t just trying to hold up one — in some cases I was trying to do two or three.

Once we realized I didn’t have the endurance to hold cabinets up for the twenty minutes it would take to get them anchored, we swapped jobs and I had to work the power tools. Mac got all squawky that I was “countersinking!” or “not countersinking!” and ruining the anchor holes and stuff.

In the end, we got a couple of cabinets up, but it turns out Mac measured wrong and now we have to rip them back down and start again. The whole ordeal was a nightmare, and I feel like I’m at my breaking point.

“Do you need to vent?”

“Yes and no. Remember how I’ve always had a policy of not saying anything about Mac that I wouldn’t first say to Mac?” This is one of my rules for a happy marriage. I believe every time you bring someone else into a confidence that you don’t share with your spouse, it forms a wedge between you and your beloved. Problems should either be addressed directly or, as sometimes is the case with me, shoved down into a little ball where they’re hopefully forgotten.

“Of course.”

“I’m having trouble keeping it all in and tamping it down. We’re angry all the time now. I feel like if we could just get this damn house straightened out, we could get back on track. I know that’ll happen eventually — the skirmishes in Kyrgyzstan can’t go on forever — but I worry that in the interim, we’re going to let our anger build up so much that we’ll say stuff we can’t unsay. Because we both want to avoid this, we’re avoiding each other.”

“If you change your mind and decide you want to talk, I want to listen.”

“Thanks, honey. So what about you? How’d the date go last night?”

Tracey giggles like a tween. “I hate to jinx it by gloating, but we had an amazing time. He took me to a show at the Goodman and afterward we had the most delectable dinner at Nightwood. For the first course, we split hand-cut pasta with veal meatballs. Then I had weather-vane scallops in a tomato broth and he got a braised pork belly that—”

I moan, “Stop, you’re killing me! You know what I ate today? Peanut butter and lemon curd on an English muffin. Untoasted. Yesterday I had a tortilla filled with ham and mustard, a can of chicken broth, a drive-through cheeseburger, and a mushy apple. I’m considering robbing a 7-Eleven just so I can go back to jail and get a hot meal.”

“When will your kitchen be up and running?”

“As it stands now? A quarter past never, because the cabinets are just impossible and they need to go up before we move on to anything else. We’re at a stopping point and we’ve barely even started.”

“Why don’t you buy or rent those support things that hold up the cabinets while you drill?”

Hold the phone — what? “What are you talking about?”

“Here, let me Google it; I think I just saw them use something like this on This Old House last week. Ah, here we go, I’m looking at the T-JAK all-purpose support tool. Says here ‘the lightweight, multipurpose T-JAK tool is designed to ease the installation of kitchen cabinets, drywall ceilings, door and window headers,’ et cetera. Lemme see if I can find a price. . Okay, yes. They start at seventy-nine fifty.”

I slump down in disappointment. “Oh, well, no wonder Mac didn’t buy one. We can’t afford seven thousand nine hundred and fifty dollars.”

“No, Mia, it’s just seventy-nine dollars.”

“Tracey, I’m going to need to call you back.” I hastily put down the phone and rush out to Mac’s workshop.

“Mac! Mac!” I race to the garage with the dogs right on my heels. Mac’s at his worktable, studying plans. “Honey! Our problems are solved! All we need is a T-JAK! It’s some kind of support that’ll hold up the ceiling when we drywall it and that way I won’t get all crippled trying to install the cabinets either! It’s a miracle! It’s, well, it’s probably some kind of tube and platform and—”

“I know what a T-JAK is.”

That stops me dead in my tracks. “You do?”

“Of course I do.”

“Then why don’t we have one?”

He shrugs. “Because I heard pros don’t use them. They’re for amateurs.”

I think about the debacle we had a couple of days ago, when we ruined a whole sheet of drywall trying to install it on the ceiling, and reflect on how much my shoulders hurt from trying to hoist cabinets and the resulting tension, and I can’t stop what comes out of my mouth next. “What the fuck do you think we are?”