Chapter 8 – Amy Ducharme
It was mid-afternoon when we headed back into town, and the four of us who were going to be living in the pit decided we would treat ourselves to a snack while discussing the roof plan, so we headed for the Best-Ever Bake Shop.
The Best-Ever Bake Shop was owned by the Ducharme family, and had been in the Essex Shopping Plaza for as long as any of us could remember. It was pretty slow on a Monday afternoon, so we got four seats at the counter and ordered our snacks. I ordered a buttercrunch doughnut and a chocolate milk, and the guys had similar orders.
Amy Ducharme stood with her hands on her hips and looked at us suspiciously while we made our orders, not writing anything down on her pad.
“Have you guys got any money?” she asked, disdainfully. Amy was sixteen, the daughter of the owners, and, to me, the most beautiful girl in Essex. I’m not sure the other guys placed her as high in the ranks of beauty as I did, but we all agreed that she was pretty special.
Rollo pulled out a dollar bill; a bit of a surprise; and the rest of us dropped coins on the counter until Amy was satisfied. She walked away to get our stuff, my eyes following in a trance, until an elbow in the ribs brought me back to attention.
We had talked a lot about the roof, and we had agreed on some things. There was no way we could build a roof separately and then lay it over the top. It would be way too heavy, and we weren’t good enough at measuring to be sure it would fit. The roof had to fit. So we were going to nail our rafters in place and then lay the plywood over the top. Supporting the whole thing was what we argued about the most.
Tom decided, that day at the bakery, that we should stop calling it “the pit,” because it was now a legitimate structure, not just a hole in the ground. So we started calling it “the cabin” from that day forward.
We had hoped we could use single two by fours as our rafters, but we didn’t have enough twelve-footers to do that. So we decided we would have a center beam, two twelve-footers nailed together, running down the middle from east to west, and six-foot rafters from the north and south walls to the center beam.
Amy brought our treats and silently scooped up our coins. Somehow the contemptuous curl of her lip made her even more attractive, and I fell into another reverie as she walked away, mentally super-imposing Ursula Andress’s bikini on Amy’s figure. A sharp hiss and another poke in the ribs brought me back to reality.
“Jesus, Denny! You’re going to get us thrown out of here!”
So I straightened up and tried to listen to what the guys were saying. We would need at least one post to hold up the center beam, maybe more. We argued about that for a while, and finally decided on two posts. They would be double two by fours, like the beam, but I was worried about how we would nail them to the floor. It would be awkward and difficult to angle the nails to securely tie the posts to the floor.
I was looking at my beautiful doughnut, crusted with brown sugar crumbs and chopped nuts. I hadn’t started eating it yet, but my chocolate milk was half gone, so I sighed and picked it up to take a bite.
It was the Amy Ducharme of doughnuts.
My mouth was full of doughnut when Rollo spoke.
“Make it like a Christmas tree stand.”
Tom, Win, and I all looked silently at Rollo, who had dived into his muffin, then we looked at each other and smiled. Of course. We all had wooden Christmas tree stands, in a closet or somewhere in the cellar, and we could use the same principle, a cross of two-by-fours attached to the beam and nailed to the floor.