The Red Paint on My Barn

The one place we were behind was the northwest corner, where the old silo stands about ten feet from the barn. You cannot get a lift in there, and the ground slopes, and nobody liked the ladders on that slope.

“Leave it,” I told Nate. “We’ll get it another day. I am not having a kid on a ladder on that hill.”

So the northwest corner stayed gray. A strip about six feet wide, from the stone foundation to the eaves. It looked like a bandage on a red arm.

At four o’clock, a truck turned in at the end of our lane.

I knew the truck. A gray half-ton with a magnet sign on the door that says Brad Jensen, Realtor, with his phone number under it. Brooke was in the passenger seat.

He came about halfway up the lane and stopped. He just sat there with the engine running, the way I had sat on Thursday night.

From where he sat he could see all of it. The cars parked down the driveway. The pickup full of empty pails. Merle’s lift. The ladders.

A few kids on the near ladders, the rest around the other side, all of them red to the elbows, and three sides of his grandfather’s barn red again.

Some of the kids stopped painting and looked at the truck. Nate said something quiet to them, and they went back to work.

After a while Brad shut the engine off and got out. He walked up the lane toward me slowly, with his hands in his jacket pockets.

He is a big man, like his father, and he walks like his father, a little heavy on the left foot. His face was white.

“Mom,” he said.

Then he stopped walking, because he had looked up at the haymow door.

Above the haymow door, in fresh white paint, about a foot tall and a little crooked, were two letters and a year.

Not E.J. 1958.

R.J. 2026.

Emma had painted them from the lift basket with Merle holding her by the back of her belt. Nate had asked the girl’s grandmother on the phone first. She had stood up there with a sash brush and done it in about ten minutes.

I had not known until that moment. I stood there in the grass and looked up at my husband’s initials where his father’s had been, and I could not say anything for a while.

Neither could Brad.

He stood with his hands in his pockets and his head tipped back, and I watched my son’s face come apart, slowly, like ice going out on a stock tank in March.

“I had a photographer coming Monday,” he said finally. His voice was very small.

“I know.”

“I already canceled him. I canceled him Thursday night after you hung up on me.”

“I’m sorry I hung up,” I said. “I’ve never done that.”

“I deserved it.”

He looked at the kids, and at the lift, and at the barn. Then he looked at the gray strip in the northwest corner and something in his face moved again.

“Mom, I didn’t do this to hurt you.”

“I know you didn’t.”

“I don’t think you do.” He took his hands out of his pockets. They were shaking. “I went up to see Dad on Tuesday. I didn’t tell you. You were down getting coffee.”

I had not known that either.