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my arms. She held me for a long time. She stroked my hair. She leaned back and looked into my face and said, “Are we getting the usual?”
    That meant the Southwestern chopped salad with grilled chicken.
    “Of course.”
    We sat down. She held on to my hand for another beat, then let it go. She put the menu aside and stared intently at me.
    “Is that a new coat?”
    “Yeah. On sale. Forty-nine bucks. You like?”
    “I love.”
    I smiled.
    “I miss you, kid.”
    I felt the tickle in my nose that signals tears. I reached for my water and took a long drink.
    “It’s a tough time,” she said. “For me. For you. For all of us. I’m here if you want to talk about it.”
    “I don’t understand.”
    “I mean we can talk. Like friends. Like family. However. Whatever you need.”
    “No, I mean I don’t understand what happened.”
    She leaned back in her chair. Her dark hair was gray at her part and had been for a while now. She took off her glasses, which were black and came up to a point at the sides. The points were decorated with a few small sparkling rhinestones. I never understood when Jane needed her glasses and when she didn’t, but I hadn’t thought to ask her, and now I probably never would.
    “What did your father tell you? No, wait. You don’t have to answer that. What you discuss with your father is between the two of you. I don’t want to overstep any boundaries.”
    The only way I could see to fill the silence that followed was to answer her question.
    “He gave me some long, convoluted lecture about how marriage is hard.”
    “Well, I guess that about sums things up.”
    “Now what?”
    She reached again for my hand. “I don’t know, sweetheart. I wish I did.”
    I opened my mouth to ask her how Tess was doing but I choked. I could only manage to half-croak.
    “Tess?”
    “She’s angry. She’s hurt. She’s disappointed and upset. She’s going through a really rough time, but she’ll pull through it. She’ll come back around. I know she will.”
    What did that mean? She’ll come back around . To me? I wanted to ask Jane more, but I couldn’t. I guess on some level I knew. Tess had left me, and now, among all the other things I had to cope with, I had to wait for Tess to come back around.
    We sat in silence as the waiter delivered our salads.
    “Harper,” Jane said. “Whenever you want it, whenever you need it, you’ll always have a home with me too.”
    That was a lie, even though she didn’t mean it to be. I didn’t have a home with Jane. When everything else fell away, when all the ties were untied and everything was undone, my only home in the world was with Dad. But I knew what she was trying to say, and I thanked her.

STEP THREE:
PUT UP WALLS
    T he foundation is done. We put in plastic piping to ventilate the crawl space, the concrete contractors filled in the cement blocks, we spaced out and installed the joists and then put down the floor sheathing, and now there’s a big, solid concrete block with a flat wood top where nothing but weeds once stood.
    I’ve done things in my life, some of them pretty well. I won the spelling bee in sixth grade. I helped my school implement a comprehensive recycling program. I taught my baby brother how to ride a bike. With Tess I made a huge Thanksgiving meal. But I’ve never done anything as impressive as building this forty-by-sixty-foot rectangular concrete block with a flat wood top.
    It’s starting to look like something is really happening. We’ve got this foundation, and there’s the pile of debris from the original house. It was a mountain when we first started, but it’s been getting smaller and smaller every day, like a pile of jelly beans in a heart-shaped box, as the pieces of the Wright family’s former life get hauled away.
    Now we’re starting on the walls.
    We’re framing them with long plywood boards, exterior walls that will close off the house from the outside world, and interior walls to make the private