Mave followed Roger and DJ home after the meeting finally broke up an hour later without any sort of resolution that would deserve the name. Her reactions to driving on her first-ever dirt road are lost to history but her dismay upon sighting the cabin was too pronounced to miss.
“You live here?”
“Exactly right. I live here. Really live.”
“He built it himself,” DJ added, not boasting, simply as a point of information.
“He built what himself?” Mave asked in alarm.
“The house.”
“Cabin,” Roger corrected.
“Cabin,” DJ amended with a twinkle in her eyes.
In books like this, you often read about how a character’s jaw dropped to express astonishment but one must admit that one has never noticed a real person respond in that way unless they were deliberately overplaying their surprise as a sort of joke. Not until Mave did it, that is. In her case the dropped jaw was an entirely unselfconscious gesture of which she was not even aware, and both Roger and DJ would be willing to swear to it on a stack of Bibles.
Mave’s jaw dropped. “The whole thing?” she squeaked.
“Why is that so hard to believe?” Roger said, irritated. “You’d think the notion that I might be able to use a hammer and saw – two fairly primitive tools that have only been around for a thousand years or so, and which have been used successfully by tons of people with lower IQ’s than the average donut – is so outrageous that it would be easier for you to believe in Santa Claus or UFO’s.”
“But–“ Mave said. “I– You–“
She may have just been stuttering or she may have been trying to form a complete sentence. We’ll never know because Roger steamed right over her. “Building a house isn’t like building a nuclear reactor, you know. It’s a fairly simple procedure and any boob can master it given three or four days’ practice and a decent manual.”
DJ tried very hard not to look at the crooked wall with the window frame so off-center that the gap in the corner had to be stuffed with one of Roger’s old sweaters and an entire Sunday New York Times to keep out the wind and the rain – a window which was, we might add, directly in Mave’s eye-line.
“I’m not the idiot, the stumblebum, the moron, you seem to think I am.” Roger was rolling now, deeply ensconced in the feverish state of righteous indignation the intelligentsia used to call High Dudgeon. “I can tie my own shoelaces, walk and chew gum at the same time, and have even been known to show sufficient perspicacity to boil water when the occasion called for it. You always treated me like a moderately advanced five-year-old with Attention Deficit Disorder, but in fact I am a reasonably accomplished, reasonably capable grown-up with skills and talents you know nothing about.” He then made a grand, sweeping gesture that took in the cabin, the woods, the mountain, and possibly the world. “Feast your eyes. I did all this!”
“Of course you did, Roger,” Mave said soothingly, as if she was talking to a moderately advanced five-year-old with Attention Deficit Disorder who was throwing a tantrum. “And I can’t tell you how much I admire you for it. Why, I was positively floored when I realized what you’d done. Roger,“ she opened her eyes wide and gazed at him for a good five seconds in what was – or gave every appearance of being – awe before finishing, “I’m seeing you in a whole new light. You’re right. I never realized just how gifted you are, and in so many different ways! I had you all wrong.”
DJ’s hands were centimeters from meeting in applause for Mave’s dazzling performance when she stopped them and forced them into her pockets. “How sweet,” she said.
Roger, taken aback by what seemed to be a swift surrender from a quarter he’d never allowed himself to hope would do any such thing, managed to be generous in victory. “Come on in, see what I’ve done with the inside.”
Mave, like the tactical genius she was, took his arm. “Yes, please. I’d love to. I’ll bet you made it all…homey. Cozy and comfortable.”
“I did, yes.”
DJ followed them into the cabin with her hands jammed firmly into the back pockets of her jeans and biting her tongue so hard she left a scar shaped exactly like her left front tooth.
