“Just keep in mind,” she cautioned me, “that if I find lead, you’ll be responsible to take care of it immediately, or the city will do it themselves, and that’ll be very expensive.”

“Sure, “I said. “I mean, if I find lead in my house, obviously I’ll want to take care of it.”

It was a Faustian bargain I was willing to make, because the upside seemed so clear and the downside so minute. Ha!

We lived in a ranch at the time, so there were just two floors to check. First, the main floor. I held my breath as she swabbed the kids’ rooms. Nothing. The kitchen. Clean. The bathrooms. Fine. Well, at least I knew that my daughter’s favored rooms were all fine.

“It doesn’t seem like there’s anything here,“ Nina said, looking mildly displeased at the good news. “Maybe there’s a daycare where your daughter goes that I can swab? A grandmother’s house? “

I hurried to assure her that my daughter was pretty much exclusively at home. (I did catch her nibbling at my mother’s necklace the Sunday before this mess. Who knew what might have been on that necklace of dubious Amazonian origin? But I wasn’t sending Nina to my mother’s house.)

Next, she headed down to the basement. The playroom showed no lead, even at the spots where the pipes had backed up. Phew. I sat back on the couch, contemplating when I’d become the kind of person who let strangers see my playroom in a chaotically messy state. Maybe around baby number four.

Abruptly, I heard a noise. Nina was crowing in one of the back rooms of the basement. “I found it!”

It was a single post, painted white, holding up the beam that kept my house standing. It was in a dark back room that I didn’t think my daughter ever crawled into. And apparently, it was covered in lead paint.

We’d done it! We’d found the lead, even if I had my doubts about it being The Lead in Question. “I’ll make some phone calls,” I assured Nina. “I’ll take care of it.”

“Make sure you do, and quickly,” Nina admonished me, and I felt properly meek, chastised as the irresponsible owner of one lead column. “Or the city will do it themselves, and that’s—” Very expensive. Right.

I was going to get rid of the lead paint, but it wasn’t exactly a priority, now that I knew where it was. I just shut the door and told the kids not to go in there. No big deal.

A week later, I got a call while I was teaching. “This is Nina from the Department of Health,” the missive said. “Please call me back immediately.”

She was not pleased that I hadn’t taken care of the lead paint yet. “You don’t want me to send in the city.”

“Right,” I said hastily. “Got it.”

I collected numbers that night and called them, one after another, over the course of several days. I sent emails and pictures and measured the pole for them. “It’s just a small job!” I assured them. “Won’t take more than an hour!”

In the lead removal business, apparently, this is not a plus. “Lady, I’m not coming to your house for five square feet of lead. I don’t do any jobs that are less than two thousand dollars,” one man informed me. (That was the lowest quote we got.) Another just stopped emailing when I sent him a picture of my pole. A third gave me a 20-minute lecture on the expenses involved in him removing the paint. Three others wouldn’t call me back.

You know who did call me back? Nina, every single day. Somehow, she figured out when my recess was, because I was getting those calls at three ten on the dot. One Sunday afternoon, she stood outside my house, writing on a clipboard and shaking her head while my doorbell recorded her displeasure. I like to think that there are just so few cases of lead poisoning in New York City that she had the time to devote her entire life to my slightly elevated lead count. (Sadly, this is probably not true. I’ve seen the recent election results.)

Meanwhile, I returned to the doctor, who retested my daughter and found that the count had dropped way below the danger line. He gave me some phone numbers, too, and they also refused to come for my tiny job. I was beginning to consider buying some lead paint on the black market and splattering it across the room. Watch them laugh off my job then.

Nina was not pleased with the happy update about my daughter’s reduced lead levels. “You need to take this very seriously. Or I will have to send in the city—”

“I know, I know,” I sighed.

Maybe I sounded too dismissive, because two days later, I got some kind of official-looking injunction in the mail. I had 14 days to remove the lead, or I would be fined $2,000. A day. It was definitely something like that.

I made more calls. We were getting pretty far from home at this point in the lengthy list of licensed lead abatement services. And unsurprisingly, no, the next number on the list was not willing to drive in from Rochester for five square feet of lead paint.

“What if I just wrap the whole pole in carpet?” my husband suggested. “No paint, and Nina might be satisfied.”

“Or she might start calling at night, too,” I groaned. It didn’t seem like there was any way out of this.

The next day, at three ten sharp, Nina checked in. “We’re running out of time,” she reprimanded me. “This is urgent. If you don’t find a contractor soon, I’ll have no choice. The city will take care of it. And it’s very expensive.”

“You know what?” I said. “I’ll take it. Send in the city. Have them do the work. At least they’re willing to come.” We weren’t exactly drowning in money, but it couldn’t be worse than the fines, or losing my recess every single day.

“Oh.” Nina was baffled by this wrench in her plans. “Well, I suppose I can fill out a form. There might be a waiting list before they get to you.”

A waiting list? For my incredibly urgent leaden paint pole? Impossible. But, in fact, it was another two months before I received a call from a pleasant man who told me he’d pencil us in for lead paint removal in another few months. “Doesn’t sound like it’s a lot of work. It’ll be fifteen hundred dollars The city will send you a bill.”

They never did send a bill, though it would have been lower than any that were quoted to me. Nina came by once, a few weeks after the job was done, and made low tsking noises with her tongue as she signed some paperwork. And that particular nightmare of weeks of haranguing and harassment were finally over. I had a lead-free house, an adorable toddler who had since learned to walk but had yet to quit the thumb-sucking, and finally, some peace.

The peace lasted several years, during which time we looked at our cute little ranch and decided it was time for another home improvement project. We needed a second floor, and this promised to be a little more pricey — maybe as pricey as Nina had made lead removal from the city sound. Plus, there was all the paperwork.

All good! After Nina, I could handle anything. I was a weathered soldier of city regulations now. We hired an architect, nearly passed out at the city fees for filing, and got to work.

Almost immediately, there was a new issue. It was the beam that ran under the entire house, supported by a number of metal poles situated across the basement. “You need a stronger beam to support a second floor,” the architect, an elderly man who had once worked for the Department of Buildings, informed us. Back at the start of the project, we thought his previous employment might be an asset. He was someone who could cut through all the red tape for us!

Ha. The red tape was in his blood now, winding through his veins, entrapping us steadily in his grasp. Everything was a reason for caution. A staircase? Just an open area without any doors? Do you know what a fire hazard that is? A porch door? A balcony? My goodness, woman, what were you thinking?

It was a wonderful pleasure when he said, reluctantly, “I guess we can avoid the permits on replacing the beam if we do it quietly.” The rest of the house would need an excess of permits, of course. There’s nothing in New York City that doesn’t require a permit. Buildings. Parties. Maybe that cute little table on the corner where all the local kids like to sell Duncan Hines to raise money for Chai Lifeline. (Don’t tell the city.)

So we began a new saga of strangers traipsing through our house, tolerating the curious children following them around. Finally, the workmen put up a cage of wooden supports through the entire basement, forcing my children to actually clean it this time. They promised to remove the beam the next day.

I went down there and eyed the row of two-by-fours that were allegedly going to keep my house standing while the workers pulled out the old beam and put in a new one. They really weren’t very thick. I would have felt more confident with a marble pillar beneath each crossbeam, not something that my oldest son would use as a play sword. But if even our nervous architect thought this could hold up our house, who was I to question it?

The next day, I returned from driving a carpool to find a thin piece of metal sawed up next to the porch. It looked about the same size at the play swords that my younger son used. “That was holding up our house?” I felt a little faint.

I really wasn’t cut out for construction.

At least the new beam looked nice and sturdy. It was quadruple the size of the old one, and it looked like a tough piece of metal, big enough to handle my daughter doing back handsprings on the living room floor. Hopefully big enough to handle another floor of the house. (It’s been a year and a half now, bli ayin hara. So far, so good. Though the chandelier in the dining room might not outlast those back handsprings on my daughter’s bedroom floor.)

I noticed the way the new beam was too big for the ceiling in the basement, how it would need to be boxed up with sheetrock around it and made the basement ceiling look just a bit odd. I guess I wouldn’t be throwing any dinner parties in my basement anymore. Not that I’d ever started, on account of the fact that the playroom is frightening place to go even right after it’s been “cleaned.”

But it didn’t hit me until a few days later, when I finally next ventured into the forgotten room in the back of the basement. There sat the contents of the room: a quiet terrarium containing an animal I’m not going to mention, for fear that no one here will take me seriously again; the “family computer” that boasts a whopping two games in a sneaky attempt to make screens deeply unappealing (though now my kids are obsessed with chess and solitaire, go figure); four bookcases with all the books no one wants upstairs but no one wants to give away, either; and the newly erected beam, sitting low on the formerly leaded pole in the center of the room.

Sitting low, because the workers had sawed off half a foot of the pole to set the beam on it.

I don’t know a whole lot about lead paint. I had to google some things to make sure that my miraculous story was not me being overly dramatic. But it turns out that if you cut right through a pole covered in lead paint, you release a whole lot of lead dust into the air, which can then be ingested by anyone who breathes that air. Adult. Unnamed reptile. And fragile, delicate children.

But my daughter had gotten a baffling result on a single test, never replicated again, and I had made a series of deeply annoying decisions because of it. A woman named Nina had harassed me for weeks to make sure that the lead was gone, not forgotten. A dozen Divine factors had converged to take care of my family, to make sure that the air we breathed in the comfort of our home was safe and good.

I’m not one to question Hashem’s plans for me. I don’t particularly like to drive, and I find it reassuring when Someone else is at the wheel. Let Him define my route. I’ll pick the music.

But it’s pretty validating, sometimes, to see that roadmap so clearly laid out in front of me, painted in nontoxic unleaded paint across my life.

(Originally featured in Family First, Issue 972)