Page 30 of Where You're Planted

“It takes as long as it takes,” she said. Then, under her breath she added, “Men.”

11

Tansy

“I don’t think that’s right,” Briar said, peering down into the bucket between Tansy’s knees.

Tansy stopped stirring the thick, gray mixture and brushed her hair out of her eyes with her forearm. Her butt was falling asleep from sitting on another overturned bucket. “What’s wrong with it?”

Briar presented Tansy’s phone screen to her. Preferring to read instructions rather than touch the dubious mixture herself, she’d pulled up a wikiHow article on finishing your own drywall. “It says it should look like creamy mashed potatoes.”

“Doesn’t it?” Tansy muscled her stirring stick through the mud again, grunting with the effort. She’d already broken two of these wooden sticks, which were made for stirring paint, not joint compound. The guy who had helped her at Home Depot had suggested an attachment for a drill to make this part easier, but Tansy didn’t own a drill, so here they were.Her arms were going to be sore before she even reached the application stage of the process. “Should it be runnier?”

“I don’t know,” Briar said, scrunching up her nose. “I don’t like mashed potatoes.”

Tansy laughed. She added a little more water, which made stirring easier, but she honestly had no idea what this stuff was supposed to look like.

When the mixture seemed reasonably creamy, Tansy removed the plastic packaging on the roll of tape that would go over the joints between the sheets of drywall. “Where did the experts land on wetting the tape?”

Briar scratched her head. “Some sayalwaysget it wet, but some saynever.”

“Cool,” Tansy said on a sigh.

“Are you sure we should do this by ourselves?” Briar asked, casting an uncertain frown at the empty living room around them. Every single wall in their house needed to be finished. “Seems hard. And messy.”

“Hey,” Tansy said, tossing the tape back onto the pile of supplies. She lifted Briar’s chin and slipped her phone from Briar’s hand, tucking it into the back pocket of her overalls. “We are perfectly capable of doing this. And nothing is too hard when you take it one step at a time. What are we?”

Briar’s eyebrows bunched together in thought, and Tansy gave her chin a little jostle. “Come on. We’re not damsels waiting for some prince. We’re…”

Briar’s eyes sparked with recognition, and she recited with gusto, “Independent women!”

“Exactly. We solve our own problems.” Tansy squared herself to the bare slabs of sheet rock, which were thankfully already attached to the studs. “And today, we finish our own drywall.”

“Well, today and tomorrow and the next day,” Briar said, ever a stickler for facts. “It takes three days because you have to let the mud set and then sand it and then do it again.”

“Okay, yes,” Tansy said, her shoulders sagging a little. She did not feel particularly confident about any of this, but if there was one lesson she was determined to teach her daughter, one thing she wishedshe’dlearned at a much younger age, it was this: Never put yourself in a position where your only hope is for someone to rescue you. So she cast aside her many doubts, scooped some mud into the container that looked like a bread pan, grabbed the wide metal spatula, and slapped the first glob of mud along one of the seams. “What does ImYourDadNow say about wetting the tape?”

Briar shook her head solemnly. “Never.”

“Then it’s settled. Dry tape.”

Twenty minutes later, Tansy couldn’t imagine how wetting the tape would have helped anyway. The mud was so slippery, the tape kept sliding down the wall every time she went to smear more joint compound over it. She tried to pull the tape back into place but succeeded only in creating ridges where it twisted and bunched up. Finally, she peeled off the whole strip in frustration, scraped off as much mud from the wall as she could, and started over.

Briar had lost interest and was back to reading a book about luna moths in the beam of sunlight spilling through the front window but paused when the familiar ringtone of her new tablet reached them from the bedroom. As she ran to answer it, Tansy called out, “Stay back there while you—” But she stopped because she wasn’t going to ask her daughter to hide things for her.

“I know!” Briar shouted back as she rounded the corner. “I don’t want to get mud on my tablet.”

Tansy hadn’t been worried about that. For one thing, Briar had steered well clear and wasn’t in any danger of making direct contact with the joint compound. Unlike Tansy, who had it on her arms, clothes, and somehow in her hair. But if she brought the tablet out here, Charlie would see the state of their house. There was no safe angle to hide the exposed concrete floor, the unfinished walls, the lack of furniture, or the gaping hole that was the kitchen.

And yeah, maybe she shouldn’t actively hide all this from Charlie. But he would say she should have told him sooner, remind her of how many times he’d offered her money in the last several months, point out that she’d insisted over and over that they were back on their feet and everything was fine. Because theywerefine. Maybe they weren’tthriving, but there were plenty of folks who were way worse off, and considering all the things that bothered Briar, from clothing seams to food textures to interacting with strangers to any weather that wasn’t cloudless and sunny, the state of the house didn’t seem to bother her at all. She still thought sharing the one finished room with Tansy was a sleepover and that it was funny to cook in the bathroom.

Tansy would tell Charlie eventually. She just wanted to get a little more of the work done before she did. Like the walls. And the floor.

She strained at first to hear if Briar was giving the whole thing away, but she couldn’t make out more than murmurs.

As Tansy returned to her task, a familiar white Jetta with a Saint Francis figurine adhered to the dashboard pulled up out front, and Marianne, Kai, and Irma spilled out. For the second time, Tansy’s heart jumped at the thought of exposure. She ducked back from the window. What were they doing here? She’d never invited them to her house, even before the storm, but she really did not want them here now. Shepaced back and forth out of sight in the corner, holding her muddy spatula and unbuckling and re-buckling her overall strap, wishing she looked more put together than her house.

When she didn’t answer the first knock, Marianne pressed her face to the window. Tansy had misjudged the angle because she made direct eye contact and waved.

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