The Little White House Next Door

The paint

By the end of July the little white house had become ours in small ways. Cody had hung a basketball hoop on the garage. Brooke had planted zinnias along the front walk.

I had replaced the water heater with a man from the hardware store and bought a porch swing at the farm sale out by Chase.

The porch was the last thing. The floor boards were gray and peeling, and the rails had not seen paint since the Clinton years.

I bought two gallons of white for the rails and a gallon of gray porch enamel at the hardware store on Main and stacked them by the door.

I meant to start on the first Sunday in August. I took my coffee out to the fence at six-thirty. Mama was there in her housecoat.

The air was still cool, and the doves were going, and down the block somebody was mowing early to beat the heat.

“You’re going to paint all that yourself?” Mama said.

“Brooke said she’d help after church. Cody said he’d help if I paid him.”

“That boy,” Mama said, and smiled into her mug.

That was when I heard it. Not the rumble. Something else, an engine I knew better than my own heartbeat, with the little tick in the lifters that it had had since 2015.

It turned the corner at the Lutheran church and came up the street slow.

Mama set her mug down on the fence post. She looked past me toward the street, and I watched her face change.

“Angie,” she said. “Look what he’s driving.”

The first Sunday in August

It was the old pickup. Dennis’s 2006 Silverado, the blue one with the dent in the tailgate from when Cody backed it into the barn at twelve.

It had been sitting behind the rental all summer, nose to the fence, while the Corvette got the driveway.

He pulled it into the little white house’s driveway behind my Buick and shut it off.

The engine ticked a few times and went quiet. He sat there a minute with both hands on the wheel. Then he got out.

He had on his old jeans with paint on the knees and a T-shirt from the Rice County Fair, 2011.

In the bed of the pickup there were two drop cloths, a paint tray, a roller on an extension pole, and three new brushes still in the plastic.

I came around the side of the house with my coffee still in my hand. Mama stayed at the fence. I could feel her there behind me like a hand on my back.

“Morning,” Dennis said.

“Morning.”

“Where’s the car?” I asked, though I knew. There was no car. There was only the truck and the man and the brushes.