forthsofar | a home that rings with joy and laughter, with the ones that you love inside

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a home that rings with joy and laughter, with the ones that you love inside

There was nothing wrong, exactly, with the furniture in their new apartment. Some of it came with the unit, while others were ones Neil planned to bring one floor down from his old, smaller place. All serviceable, even if some of it was a little plain. It’s just that none of it was hers, a realization that only struck Rosie once her few belongings from the Home--all she had in the city, all she had in the world--were packed up in a dismally small amount of boxes in the corner of the dormitory, awaiting transport to Candlewood the next day.

She’d gone out then, intending only to spend an hour or so in the Törgt showroom--just to look around, to get some possible ideas for how to make the best of what they already had. But she’d found one piece, then another, and it had made so much sense to think about getting another bookshelf, and the desk chair in her bedroom wasn’t comfortable at all… Before long, Rosie had a slip of paper scribbled with product code numbers and a growing awareness of two things: she was about to spend a truly breathtaking amount of money, and she hadn’t the slightest idea how she was going to get any of the things she planned to buy home with her on the bus.

“You know, we offer a delivery service,” said one of the salespeople standing nearby; mostly out of helpfulness, Rosie hoped, than a slightly grasping desire to take advantage of her clearly overwhelmed state. Whatever the impetus, though, the suggestion was a good one, and she followed him to the counter, coming away a few minutes (and several hundred dollars) later with all her furniture ordered and a FLÅTTEPÄK delivery scheduled for tomorrow.

The next day, after completing the last of her discharge paperwork with Matron Robin and getting David’s help to move her few boxes from the Home to the apartment, Rosie settled in, listening for the sound of the buzzer as she made space for the things she’d so impulsively purchased. It took less time than she expected. Going to the door, she opened it wide, pausing at the sight that greeted her: not a hallway full of burly movers toting furniture, but one single, slightly weedy-looking deliveryman with a pushcart full of long, flat boxes.

“You Wilson?” he asked, starting to pull the dolly past her into the apartment. “Got your Törgt stuff, where’dya want it?”

“I think there’s been a mistake,” she said, utterly baffled as the man started piling the boxes in the middle of the living room floor. “I ordered...I ordered quite a lot of furniture, what is this? What are you doing?”

“Yeah, you got the FLÅTTEPÄK service, right? That’s this. Instructions should be in each box, hardware, everything you need.” Rosie froze, staring at him in disbelieving, dawning horror, and he snorted--a reaction she found more than a little distasteful even in the midst of everything else. “Most people have fun putting it all together. It’s one of those...like a bonding experience thing. Oh, and I’m gonna need a signature, kid.”

What could she do? She signed. And then, once he had taken his cart and gone, the door shut tightly behind him, Rosie went back to the stack of boxes and burst into hysterical, embarrassed laughter. Taking out her phone, she sat down on the floor, the boxes behind her, and took a selfie, texting it out to all her friends with a brief if frantic message: Does anyone know how to build furniture? Help!!!

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Neil has to admit that the storeroom is his favorite part. He thinks of laying on his stomach in the living room on one of his brief home visits during summer school, watching the televised footage from Moscow and the American National Exhibition, all the technology and the layouts of homes that were just like his.

"They should be," he agrees. Beau comes over to investigate them as they sit and settle on the floor. "All the parts were there when I bought my dresser. So let's see..."

He does hate the instructions to build things, though. The little amorphous person with its dumb smile always seems, in a way, to be mocking him.

If nothing else, the instruction booklet is right on top; Rosie takes it out and sets it aside, along with the small bag of assorted screws and tiny wooden dowels. With Neil's help, she lifts the various pieces of the bookshelf out of the box and lays them out side by side on the floor, Beau nosing gently at each as they're set down.

"Well, it all looks like it should be a bookshelf when we're finished," she says, opening the instructions to the first page. "That's a good sign." She looks from the illustration to the pieces on the floor and back again a few times. "Okay, I think we start with this long flat piece here, and...seven? I think seven, of the fiddly-looking screws."

Rosie sets out the boards, and Neil sorts the screws and pegs. A couple times Beau looks too intently at a little piece, and Neil gently shooes him away. In the days they've been back from everything else, while he's been preparing for this move, Beau has been invaluable to him. Right now he's just a bit of a nuisance, but a lovable one at least.

"Which?" he looks over at the booklet. There's three variety of fiddly screws, and he doesn't want to give her the wrong ones.

"These," she says, holding up the instructions and pointing at the illustration. "The ones with the shorter...screw part, I suppose? The part with the threads. And the longer smooth bit above that." It's a frankly ludicrous description, but so much about this process already has been, Rosie supposes they may as well keep going.

At least until the bookshelf is, finally, in one piece.

They work with only occasional talking, but with a fair amount of laughter. It's utterly ridiculous, but at least the bookshelf is one of the easier structures to put together. It doesn't take them long at all, before they have it put together and the last thing to do is to nail on the back piece.

Neil sits back, handing Rosie the hammer.

"Go on then, Rosie the Riveter," he teases with good nature. "Let's finish her off."

In a way, it really is the sort of bonding experience the deliveryman had said it might be--not that Rosie, even now, was inclined to find much to appreciate about the slightly condescending way he'd treated her. But they are having fun, joking and laughing and good-naturedly shooing Beau away from whatever bits of the bookshelf he's decided deserve his attention, until all at once they're nearly finished.

"I doubt this'd do much to help any kind of war effort," she says, giggling at the teasing nickname as she takes the hammer. "Though this has been a bit of a battle already, so...perhaps." Rosie flashes him a grin, then makes sure the thin plywood backing is straight before she starts tapping the nails in, one by one.

Neil smiles and sits back for a moment, before hauling himself up to go and get them each a drink. Beau follows after him a moment later, as they leave Rosie to finish up the bookcase, and when he returns with two bottles of coke, Beau parks himself on the couch like he belongs there.

Neil smiles a little bit. "It's shaping up," he says happily. "I know it's all still boxes and moving and stuff, but it is, right?" He wants this to work, desperately.

Rosie drives the last nail into the back and sets the hammer aside, inordinately pleased to have managed this much already. With care, she maneuvers the bookshelf upright; empty as it is, it's small and light enough for her to do that on her own, though she knows she'll need help getting it the rest of the way into her bedroom later.

"It's absolutely shaping up," she says, taking one of the bottles from Neil when he comes back. With a grin, she clinks the neck of hers against his in a sort of toast before taking a sip. "There's still a lot to get settled, but...it's already feeling like home." She looks over at him then, feeling at once both grown up and terribly young, sentimental and wholly sincere. "I'm so glad we managed this."

Neil grins at her brightly, just happy that they've managed to do it. He's missed living with someone, after the years of it at school, and while he has the occasional guest it's not the same as having a friend and compatriot here. No, that's been fewer and further between, until these past few days of Rosie moving in, and he's excited to make things work with her.

"So am I ever going to meet this boyfriend of yours?" he asks with a bit of a laugh, sitting on the coffee table as he drinks his coke. "I've seen him in passing, but I don't think we've met. Is he going to come help you unpack?"

There's maybe a quiet, teasing innuendo in there.

She doesn't miss the teasing and suggestion in his voice, any more than Neil's likely to overlook the pink flush that rises to her cheeks. "Since he has a car, I asked if he'd help move my things over from the Home," she says, trying to make the explanation sound breezy and light. "Earlier today, when you were at work. But I really ought to have you two meet, you're right. It's silly you haven't."

They hadn't taken any more advantage of the empty apartment then they had any of the times they'd been alone together at David's house--though, as always, there was the suggestion that they could, this sense of some decision or choice drawing ever closer. Laughing softly, mostly at her own awkwardness, Rosie takes another sip of her soda.

"I'm sure I can be a lot to handle," Neil says, sweet and understanding that a new relationship sometimes meant keeping everything to yourself. But Rosie and Neil are living together, and he'd rather like to like David.

He sighs and leans back a little bit. "It's nice to be seeing someone, isn't it?"

Not that he was. Not exactly, anyway. But he does like being someone's beau, and Rosie seems terribly smitten with hers.

"You're only ever just enough," she reassures him with a grin. "It's more that he's got a summer job, and some weekends he's staying out in the countryside--his parents aren't together, which is fine, it's not as embarrassing as it'd be back home or anything--but it means he's away some of the time."

Her blush deepening, she nods emphatically in answer to his question. "Nobody ever fancied me, back home," she admits. "Unless you count Colin in year two, who told me I was quite pretty, he supposed, which isn't at all the same thing."

Neil nods along, understanding. It is the benefit of being from near the same years, back home, that they just understand the cultural mores of one another, even separated by an ocean. Neil can't think of a single friend of his whose parents were split up. One of the boys, a year younger than him and so not very close, his mother had remarried but that was because of the war in Korea and not because of a divorce.

"It's not," Neil agrees with a laugh. Then he sizes Rosie up playfully and teases, "I suppose he was right though, huh? Even I can see that."

She laughs as he looks her up and down, the way he plays as much a part with it as anything he'd ever done on stage. "Gosh, if even you can tell I'm pretty, it's a wonder I don't have boys falling at my feet every time I go outside."

"Oh, shove it," Neil says, laughing at her teasing. He was honest, after all. Rosie is lovely, and if he liked women, he's quite certain they would have managed something else. But he loves their friendship, this platonic closeness they've managed.

"Anyway. Have him over sometime. I'll rustle up somebody, we'll make it a double date or something." He smiles. "Or I can be the awkward third wheel. Keep him honest."

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a home that rings with joy and laughter, with the ones that you love inside

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