Page 65 of Goodbye Paradise
THANK YOU for the Halloween candy! You’re right — we’ve never had any before. At the Compound, Halloween was considered a pagan ritual.
Caleb and I are busy converting the big room over Daniel’s workshop into an apartment. It’s a ton of work, but it will be nice when it’s done. Daniel bought the fixtures, and Caleb and I are doing the work for free. (Caleb’s labor is a lot more valuable than mine, but I’m pretty handy with the power sander these days.)
In other news, I now have a driver’s license. Caleb taught me to drive, finally, using Maggie’s car. Soon, Caleb is going to buy a used car. He says he’s waiting for just the right one to turn up.
We are becoming more independent, but it’s taking forever.
My love to Brenda,
Josh
Twenty-One
Autumn
The apartment wasalmostready. There was running water now — but only in the bathroom.
It was a Monday night, which meant that Caleb and I had been working on our renovation for ten hours. Monday was still Caleb’s day off. And it wasn’t a big catering day, either, so he and I always got a lot of renovation work done on Mondays.
The kitchen cabinets were in already, and the floor had been insulated from below. “You can’t have an apartment over a workshop without good insulation,” Daniel had said. “You’d hear power tools all day long.”
“I wouldn’t mind,” I’d argued.
“We’re going to do this right,” Daniel had insisted, “because I don’t want to redo it someday.” He paid a man to come and blow foam between the apartment’s floor and the workshop’s ceiling.
There weren’t too many other tasks we’d had to hire out, though. Daniel had built the kitchen cabinets, and Caleb and I were finishing them. As predicted, we’d needed some help with the plumbing, but it wasn’t too bad. Caleb did the heating himself. “If I can fix a car’s heater, I can put in baseboard units,” he’d said.
And he had.
For my part, there was endless sanding and painting. But it wasn’t fussy work, so I didn’t mind it. When I finished the day with sawdust in my hair, I felt like one of the guys. It was a nice contrast to all the nursery rhymes and fairy books that Chloe and I spent the week looking at together.
At almost one year old, Chloe could say a couple of words. She wasn’t a prolific talker, but she said “dada” and a variation with an “m” in it, which was supposed to be “mama,” but wasn’t quite. She said “more” and “bye-bye” and “no.” (She said that last one a lot.)
She did not, however, say “Josh.”
“I think the J sound is hard,” Maggie had said more than once. Every morning I spent a few minutes trying to get Chloe to say “Josh.” “You can do it,” I urged her. “It doesn’t have to be perfect, either. Say…Josh.”
“No,” she said instead.
“Fine,” I sighed, as Maggie laughed. “But if you end up saying ‘Caleb’ first, heads are gonna roll.”
Today I hadn’t seen Chloe since lunch, though, because Caleb and I had sanded the baseboards, and then I put a coat of primer on the wall.
Working on our place with Caleb was fun — so much more fun than working at the Compound had ever been. Because we were working on something forus. That was just amazing. I didn’t mind all the affection I received while we worked together, either. He touched my back when he asked me a question. And I got a nice kiss when we sat down in the middle of the bare floor for lunch.
Life was good. And now it was quitting time. “What color are we going to paint this wall, anyway?” I asked Caleb as I tapped the metal lid back onto the top of a can of primer.
“White, right?” he grunted.
“It doesn’t have to be,” I argued. “I like that yellow color in Maggie’s dining room. It makes the place look sunny.”
“Well…” Caleb chuckled. “If you want yellow, I got no problem with that. But you’re the one that doesn’t want to go public.” He took off his tool belt.
“Why? What are you saying?”
Caleb grinned at me. “I’m saying that gay guys paint their walls bright colors. At least on TV.”
“Really? Damn it.”
