I doubted that. And I certainly wasn’t going to forward it to Carol to find out. My sister Christine is seventeen months younger than I am and happily married, at least most of the time, with two kids who are more perfect than not. It drove her absolutely crazy that all family information filtered through Carol first. As far as I could tell, Carol’s position as the family know-it-all was the only thing Christine had ever wanted that she couldn’t get.

Joe knocked on the wall between my room and the boys’ room in a few different places, his ear close to the wall. He made a few marks on the wall, then threaded his thick carpenter’s pencil through his curly brown hair and tucked it behind one ear.

That pencil was the perfect size for preschoolers to grip, like the pencil version of a jumbo crayon. I started to ask Joe where I could order some for my class. Took one look at his face and decided I’d wait and make Christine find out for me later.

“Okay,” Joe said. “In a house this old, we’re looking at quarter-inch wood lath strips nailed horizontally across the wall studs. Three-coat plaster is applied on top of the lath, typically a total of 7/8-inch thick. Which gives us walls that are an inch thick, give or take, versus the usual ½-inch thickness of today’s drywall.”

John was hanging on every word. “Do you know what this old plaster is made out of?”

Joe stroked the wall with one palm. “In this neck of the woods, it would have been lime-based plaster, generally made up of lime putty, sand, and horsehair—or some other kind of hair—to reinforce it.”

John stroked the wall, too. “Amazing to think that horsehair from almost 130 years ago is still in those walls.”

Christine and I both neighed spontaneously. Joe and John ignored us.

Joe nodded. “An old-time plasterer I know told me they used horsehair to reinforce the plaster here on the coast because the only sand available was beach sand, which has lots of salt and broken-down particles from the ocean mixed in with it, so it doesn’t hold up well over time. No idea if he really knew what he was talking about or if he was just spouting off.”

Christine took another selfie, this one a solo shot, standing in the middle of the room that had once been half hers.

Joe held up the sledgehammer like it was a dinner fork. “Who wants the honor of breaking through?”

John looked at me. “Ladies first.”

I managed to swing the sledgehammer a couple inches in each direction at about knee height.

When we used to play catch as kids, my brothers tried to coach me so I didn’t throw like a girl. I still threw like a girl, and I definitely swung a sledgehammer like one. Maybe even like a toddler.