The Steeple I Painted Every Ten Years

Lois

My sister-in-law Lois lives in Sullivan, about an hour northeast of us on the interstate, and she turned seventy-five this fall. She is Darlene’s older sister, a retired school secretary with a house full of cats and a laugh you can hear through a wall.

Darlene had been saying since August that we ought to go up for her birthday. I had been saying I would think about it. I did not want to go anywhere, to tell you the truth. I wanted to sit on my porch and look at the thing I couldn’t fix.

“Three nights,” she said. “Wednesday through Saturday. You can eat Lois’s pot roast and sit in her recliner and watch her cats walk on the television.”

“I’d rather be home.”

“I know you would. That’s exactly why we’re going.”

I should have caught it then. But a man who has been married forty-eight years stops hearing the tricks. I loaded our bags into the Buick on Wednesday morning before it was light, and we went out the back way past the Hobbs place, and I did not look at the church.

I remember that. I remember making a point of not looking.

Three nights

Lois’s pot roast was as good as I remembered. The cats were exactly what I expected. We sat on her porch in the afternoon, and she told me a long story about a woman at her church who put the wrong mushroom in a casserole, and I laughed in spite of myself.

I slept badly. The mattress was soft and the street was too quiet, and at three in the morning on Thursday, I lay there thinking about the south face of the steeple with water running down it.

Darlene kept slipping out of rooms with her phone. I noticed it, and I put it down to Tammy. Our daughter lives in Springfield with her husband and two boys, and she and her mother talk every day.

But Tammy herself called me on Thursday night and asked three times what I was doing on Saturday, which is an odd thing to ask a man sitting in a recliner in his sister-in-law’s living room.

“Same as today,” I told her. “Nothing.”

“Good,” she said, and there was something in her voice. “That’s good, Daddy.”

Friday morning, Darlene was humming at the sink. I hadn’t heard her hum in months. I asked her what she was so happy about, and she said it was a nice day, and it was, a clear and cool fall morning with the maples red out front.

I let it go. I think some part of me did not want to know.