The Pencil Marks on My Pantry Door

Abby opened it.

The pencil marks start about the height of my hip and go up the bare wood like the rungs of a ladder. Don did the measuring. He used a carpenter’s pencil and a hardback book laid flat on top of the child’s head, and he printed the names because his handwriting was terrible.

Jeff, age 3. That was the first one Don ever made, in the spring of 1985.

Kim, age 2. That one is the lowest. He had to hold her against the door, and there is a wobble in the line.

They go up. Jeff at six. Kim at four. Every birthday, both of them, and sometimes a mark in between when one of them swore they had grown and demanded a recount.

About two-thirds of the way up there is one that says Kim, age 13, and beside it, in a girl’s round handwriting, not Don’s, the word finally. With two lines under it.

“Finally what?” Josh asked.

“Five feet,” I said. “She was the shortest girl in her class. She had waited a long time.”

Higher than that, there are others. Jeff, 6 ft, 1998, with an exclamation point. And then, starting low down again in different pencil, lighter, a second ladder. Those are my grandchildren. Kim’s two, and Jeff’s boy when he visits.

And at the very top, just under five foot eleven, one line with no name. I wrote the date beside that one myself. It is the week after Don’s funeral. I stood on the step stool and measured from the old marks on the door frame in the garage, where he had once stood and let the kids measure him for a joke, and I carried it over. I wanted him on the door with the rest of us.

I did not tell them that part. I could not have got through it.

She reached out and put two fingers on the lowest mark. Kim, age 2. The wobbly one.

“My grandma had a door like this,” she said. “In Fairbury. It was the door to the cellar stairs.”

“When she went into the home, my uncle sold the house. They painted the whole inside before they listed it. To make it fresh.” Her voice broke on the word. “I went over to get her sewing box and the door was just white. All of it. I was on that door. My mom was on that door.”

Then she was crying. Not loud. She cried the way you do in a stranger’s house, with her chin tucked down and her shoulders held in, trying to be no trouble about it.

Josh did not say a word. He did not tell her it was all right, or hush her. He just put his hand flat between her shoulder blades and left it there.

Don used to do that. Exactly that. In church, at funerals, at the kitchen sink.

I had to look at the floor for a minute.

“I’m sorry,” Abby said, wiping her face with the heel of her hand. “I’m so sorry. We’re in your house and I’m…”

“You’re all right, honey.”

I got a paper napkin from the holder and handed it to her with my good hand. She took it, and then she held on to my hand for a second too, napkin and all.

“Mrs. Weber,” she said. “Do you want to leave here?”

Nobody had asked me that. Not in six weeks. Not the doctors, not the social worker, not the woman with the notary stamp. Not my own girl.