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“Where’re they going?”
Mom pulled her closer and hooked her arm around hers. “We better keep following and find out.”
Okay. Bo’s huge, face-splitting grin, Mom’s tiny, mysterious smirk, Dad’s back-cracking hug could all have been attributed to her arrival after half a year away. But now her family was acting weird. Something was up.
At the far corner of the house, Dad and Bo turned and disappeared from sight. Otto trotted out of view right behind them.
“What’s going on?” Gia asked.
Mom didn’t answer, except to pick up the pace. Cheese and Crackers ambled along with them, doing circles around their feet as they walked.
When she turned that corner of the house, Gia saw where the boys were headed. She stopped short. “Wha?”
Bo had struggled with regular school so much that Mom had pulled him out when he was still in primary grades, and he’d been homeschooled from that point forward. Dad had been away at the time, and the club had stepped in to fill his gap as much as they could. They’d built Bo a one-room schoolhouse, so that he could ‘go to school,’ too.
Gia had been seriously envious of that little building. Mom had tricked it out with bright paint and all kinds of cool learning activities. It really was a little schoolhouse. As Bo had grown, the contents and décor of his school had changed with him. Eventually, around age fourteen, he’d started mainly teaching himself, and then the schoolhouse became a technology hub. And also a gaming center. Yeah, Gia had experienced some envy.
But now that schoolhouse was gone—or if not gone, so overhauled it was unrecognizable. What stood in its place now was a tiny house. Like, a Tiny House.
A white clapboard building, maybe twice as big as the schoolhouse. A cerulean front door. Two big windows, one on each side of the door, the trim and shutters in that same gorgeous blue.
A covered porch with a wood plank floor spanned the front of the ... Shed? Cabin? A cute round table with two matching chairs, painted bright yellow, stood before a large window on one side of the porch, a colorful Mexican pot full of succulents in the center of the table. Before the window on the other side of the porch were two old-fashioned metal lawn chairs, freshly painted a glossy lime green.
Dad and Bo stepped up onto that porch and turned around, still laden with her belongings. They were both grinning like loons. Gia could count on her hands the number of times Bo had looked so obviously happy in his entire life.
“Wha?” she grunted again.
Mom chuckled. “Come on, cara. Bo might explode if he doesn’t get to show you soon.”
“Welcome home, squirt,” Dad said as Gia reached the foot of the two porch steps.
“I don’t get it,” she said, though she was starting to.
“We built you a house!” Bo said, his voice alive with excitement. “Mom and Dad and I, and Uncle Show, and Uncle Len, and Uncle Bart, and Uncle Badger, and Aunt Shannon, and Aunt Adrienne, and Henry, and Megan, and Nolan, and Iris, and ... and ... Oh! And Loki and Aunt Cory. Everybody helped so we could get it done after the weather was good and before you got home! You need to see inside. Come see inside!”
Completely shocked and overwhelmed, Gia turned to Mom, who could be trusted to cut through the excited gushing and make something rational of all this.
Mom smiled. “Yep. We took a wall and the roof off the schoolhouse, added a couple rooms, and built you a little house.”
“Gia!” Bo called impatiently. “Come see inside!”
Still dazzled, Gia unwound her arm from her mother’s and climbed onto the porch. Dad and Bo stood on either side of the door, like overburdened sentries, and waited for Gia to turn the brushed-nickel knob and step into her new house.
It smelled like the woodshop: fresh-sawn wood, polyurethane, and paint. Gia took a long, deep inhale; that mixture was one of her favorite scents, carrying memories of watching Dad and Bo make their beautiful works of art.
The floor was polished pine—wide planks, clear finish. To her right was a small living room, with a cerulean IKEA sectional (tiny house size) and a funky white egg chair with a bright red (vermillion) seat cushion. A white faux-sheepskin rug lay between them, under a space-age pine coffee table, shaped like a Star Trek insignia. A television hung on the side wall; two floating pine shelves beneath it held other electronic entertainment components.
On the white shiplap wall above the sectional were three enlarged black-and-white photographs, matted in white and framed in simple frames in that vivid vermillion. She recognized the images—of course she did; they were her own. She’d taken a photography course to fulfill her fine art units at Mizzou, and for her final project, she’d done a photo narrative about Signal Bend. She’d gotten an A on the project (she got As in almost everything), and her photos had been featured in the student art show that spring.
Under the window was a low pine table, its edges beveled and ornately carved. Obviously Bo’s work. The succulents she’d had in her bedroom in the house—the main house now, she supposed—were arrayed across its glossy surface.
Opposite that delightful little sitting room was an equally delightful little eat-in kitchen. White cabinetry mixed with pine open shelving. Teeny island. Stainless steel countertops. Small range and fridge in butter yellow, new but in that wonderful retro style. A porthole window over the small farmhouse-style sink showed a view of the wildflower field and the woods beyond.
At the back of the house, between the kitchen and sitting areas, tucked under a narrow staircase, was a small, but complete and sleekly modern bathroom with a fairly roomy step-in shower.
And up those stairs was a loft bedroom with a big skylight in the peaked roof. Furniture from the main house was already arranged here and dressed in new linens, pure white, as she liked. A new area rug, a riot of colors like Mexican pottery, covered most of the wide-plank pine floors. The boxes she’d shipped home were stacked along the short back wall.
On the far wall, built to fill the space from the floor to the ceiling and from one slant of the roof to the other, was a bookcase, already mostly full with the books she’d left at home. One section of that beautiful bookcase, on the lowest level, held a fluffy donut pet bed, big enough for Cheese and Crackers to share.
