The Red Paint on My Barn

“Let me pay for the lift, Merle.”

He thought about it. “You can pay for the lift,” he said, which was how I knew how bad he felt about the gray.

The rental was three hundred and fifty dollars for the day. I paid it, and I was glad to.

That afternoon I drove back to Sioux Falls with Arlo’s own pajamas and his reading glasses and the pillow off his side of the bed.

He was in the therapy gym when I got there, standing between the parallel bars with a young therapist holding a belt around his waist. He took four steps. Then three more.

When he saw me, his face did the thing it does now, where one side smiles all the way and the other side tries.

“Car,” he said. It was what he called me. Not Carol. Car. He had called me that since we were nineteen. It was one of the few words that had come back.

I did not tell him about the barn.

I thought about it the whole drive over. I had told him every single thing in thirty-seven years of marriage, down to the price of the hamburger.

But he was standing between those bars working harder than I have ever seen a man work, and I could not hand him one more thing to carry that he could not lift.

So I told him the soybeans looked good and Merle was on them. I told him the barn cats were fat. I told him Brad said hello, which was true.

I slept in the vinyl chair that night, and at four in the morning I kissed his forehead and drove home in the dark to paint a barn.

The first minivan came up the lane at seven-thirty Saturday morning. By eight there were cars parked all down the grass along the driveway and twenty-two teenagers standing in my yard in old T-shirts.

It was one of those September mornings Minnesota gives you just before it takes everything back. Blue sky, no wind, the beans across the road just starting to turn yellow at the edges.

Nate stood on the tailgate of Arlo’s pickup and gave the safety talk. The kids listened better than I expected. A couple of the boys rolled their eyes at the part about ladders, and Nate looked at them until they stopped.

Then he said a short prayer, for the work and for Arlo. Twenty-two kids bowed their heads in my yard with paint rollers in their hands.

I had to walk around to the other side of the pickup for a minute.

Merle had the lift set up on the east end by eight-fifteen, with the outriggers down on boards so they would not sink in the soft ground. He and Mike Olson went up first, cutting in along the roofline with brushes.

The four dads set their extension ladders on the south side. The older kids went up two rungs at a time with a roller and a small bucket, and Nate ran the ladders, moving down the line with a hand on the rails of whichever one had a kid on it.

The younger ones worked the bottom with rollers on poles. I stirred paint and poured it into trays and moved from one end of the barn to the other like a woman serving supper at a threshing crew.