When we weren’t shopping at Wal-Mart, we were shopping online or with Grandma Letty at local mobile home centers. The shout of “mail!” became like a fire drill bell, signaling for everyone to either run upstairs or down to the basement to hide as Grandma Letty and I accepted countless deliveries of power systems, seeds, and books on everything from farming, weaving and soap making to raising sheep, cows, chickens and goats. We had so many books we could start our own library. It was probably the first town building we’d have to build in the spring, just to have somewhere to house them all.
Unfortunately, not everything went so smoothly. The last day we went to look at mobile homes, Grandma Letty and I got into an argument.
“Be reasonable, Hayden. You and Tarah need a place of your own so you can have your own bedrooms. Right now, we’ve only got enough bedrooms for the families, and even they are going to have to sleep in bunk beds in order to fit. We need at least one more small house.”
“For just Tarah and me? No way. That’s a waste of money and land.”
“Then exactly where do you think you two will sleep? In your truck?”
“You’re getting huge sectional couches for each house, right? So Tarah and I can sleep on them instead.”
“In one of the living rooms? Oh please. Be serious. You’ve never even had to share a bedroom with your brother. All your life you’ve lived in a huge house. And don’t forget, you’re not in East Texas anymore. Winters are long and miserable up here, and everyone’s going to be cooped up indoors for months. Just where do you think they’ll be spendng all their waking hours other than the living rooms? You’ll have zero space of your own to get away to, and neither will Tarah. At least let me get you a camper to tow behind that truck of yours for you and her.”
“Thanks for the offer, but I can’t take it. Spring will come soon enough. When it does, everyone’s going to start building their own homes and free up the bedrooms in the starter houses. Until then, sleeping on a couch will be fine for us.”
She spent another ten minutes trying to convince me, but there was no way she was going to change my mind on this. Tarah would never agree to having a whole room of her own. And if I took an entire room for myself while asking each family of three or four to share a bedroom and bunkbeds, that would only cement everyone’s idea of me as a spoiled rich kid. While I wasn’t sure how long I’d be staying in the village past spring, I definitely knew even a few months of winter would be far too long if everyone treated me like a spoiled brat.
Finally Grandma Letty gave up. Or so I thought.
She still got her way in the end. She just had to be a little devious about it. Just like a Shepherd.
Saturday, December 19th
On the day before the advance logging team was scheduled to leave, a honk outside had me yelling out, “FedEx.” While everyone scrambled to hide, I looked out the window. It was a delivery truck, all right. But it wasn’t FedEx, unless they’d switched to hauling strange, plastic-wrapped pallets on flatbed trailers behind big red trucks.
Grandma Letty took off outside without a coat, a bad habit of hers when she got excited. I grabbed her coat from the entrance closet while pulling mine on, then followed her outside.
She clapped her hands together like a little kid on Christmas morning, ignoring me as I draped her coat over her shoulders. “Oh, it’s here! I was so worried it wouldn’t get here in time. You have no idea how much extra I had to pay to bribe them to even get it here today. Normally they take weeks to put together, but we were in luck. They just happened to have this model in storage. Apparently somebody ordered it for Christmas then changed their minds.”
I studied the giant plastic wrapped cube on a trailer. “What is it?”
“Your future new home, of course!”
I groaned. “Grandma, we talked about this.”
“You said I couldn’t get you a trailer or an RV. This is neither. Technically it’s a house kit. You did not say I couldn’t get a house kit for you.”
“That pile of stuff is supposed to become a house?” Hands on my hips, I walked around the cube in disbelief. Not a window or door in sight. Maybe she was pulling a prank here. Shepherds could be weird like that. It was the reason my father had always claimed it was safer to avoid family reunions. Of course, now I knew he was mostly just ashamed of all the Clann descendants in his family tree.
“It’s a prefabricated tiny home. It includes a RV septic system, a toilet and shower, a ten gallon water tank with a Y shaped feeder system, an on-demand water heater, and detailed instructions. It’s prebuilt then taken down again for shipping, so it’s supposed to take only a hammer, a drill and a few days to put together.”
“What’s the point of prebuilding it then taking it down again for shipping?”
“So you can have the fun of putting it back together again, of course.” She grinned at me.
She had lost her mind.
“It’s going to be perfect for you and Tarah. It’s got loft beds at either end, one over the kitchen and one over the porch area, so you can both have your own little spaces to get away from everyone else as well as each other. And it’s got beautiful arched windows to let in lots of sunlight and a little wood burning stove for plenty of heat. The stove works for cooking too, though I also bought you an energy efficient griddle to run off the solar power system.”
I could tell she might go on for hours. Taking her short pause for an opening, I jumped in with, “Thanks, Grandma. I appreciate this. I mean, I’ve got no idea how I’ll put the da—I mean, darn thing together. But it was very...creative of you to think of this.”
Actually, the longer I thought about it, the more creative a solution it seemed. It wasn’t even a fourth of the size of the mobile homes we’d bought for everyone else. And unlike an RV, it was going to take a heck of a lot of work on my part to get it put back together somehow, which should make everyone else feel a little better about Tarah and me having our own house. I could also imagine Tarah loving having her own tiny house to fix up. She’d always whined as a kid about not having her own playhouse in her backyard. Now she’d have one that went anywhere we did.
The delivery guy hopped out of his truck and held a clipboard for my grandmother to sign. While she did, I studied the trailer and frowned.
Then again, would Tarah even want to share a house with me? Grandma Letty was assuming a lot there. Whatever this thing was between Tarah and me was still new. We hadn’t even had a real date yet, and here my grandmother was trying to get us to shack up together. Tarah might freak out about that.