The Red Paint on My Barn

“He was trying to say something to me. He worked at it, Mom. Ten minutes. His face got red. And all that came out was the same word, over and over, and I couldn’t tell what it was.”

He wiped his face with the back of his hand.

“And I walked out to the parking lot and I sat in my truck, and I thought, he’s not coming home. He’s not ever coming home to this place. And she’s going to be out here alone with three hundred acres and a hundred-year-old barn falling down around her.”

“It’s not falling down.”

“I know it’s not falling down.” He almost laughed. “I just thought if I got ahead of it. If I got it listed before winter, while land is up. Before you had to watch it go to pieces. I thought I was helping.”

Brooke had gotten out of the truck by then. She came up and stood beside him and took his arm.

“He hasn’t slept,” she said quietly to me. “He keeps saying, what if Dad doesn’t come home. He said it in his sleep last night.”

I looked at my son, and I saw him at four years old on his father’s shoulders, waving at the letters.

He was not cruel. He had never been cruel. He was scared, and he had done what his father would have done, which was to grab a tool and start fixing the thing in front of him, even if it was the wrong thing.

The difference was that Arlo would have asked me first.

“Brad,” I said, “I need you to hear something, and then we’re done talking about it.”

He nodded.

“You don’t get to decide your father is not coming home. Not you, not me, not the doctors. Him. He decides that. And until he does, this place stays the way he left it.”

“Okay,” he said.

“And the next time you are scared, you call your mother. You do not call a spray crew.”

He laughed then, a wet, broken laugh, and Brooke laughed too, and I put my arms around my son in front of twenty-two teenagers and a Methodist youth pastor.

He held on a long time. He smelled like his father’s aftershave, which he started wearing in high school because he thought nobody would notice. I noticed.

When he let go, he looked at the northwest corner again.

“What’s that?”

“That’s where we ran out of hill,” I said. “Nobody’s going up a ladder on that slope. It’ll keep.”

He looked at it for a long time, and he didn’t say anything else about it.

He and Brooke stayed and helped carry pails and fold drop cloths until the sun went down. He didn’t pick up a brush. I didn’t ask him to.

The kids finished the north side at a quarter to seven. They stood in the yard and looked at it, and somebody started clapping, and then all of them were clapping, the dads too, and Merle up in the lift.

Twenty-two kids. One day. A red barn, all but one corner.

Arlo came home nine days later, on a Monday, with a cane, a walker folded in the trunk, and a three-ring binder of exercises from his therapists.

Brad called on the Sunday night before. He asked if he could be the one to drive his father home.

“I’d like to do it, Mom. If that’s all right. You can ride along.”

I said yes. I had been waiting for him to ask.