Twelve Chairs and a Desk

The weekend in Zanesville

In February, Mark’s mother turned eighty. We drove down to Zanesville for two nights, for the party in the fellowship hall at her church and a big breakfast at her house the next morning.

It was the first time in years we had gone anywhere overnight.

I remember being happy in the car on the way home Sunday afternoon. Mark held my hand across the console.

We talked about his mother, and about how good she looked, and about nothing at all. It was a nice drive.

We got home a little after four. The house smelled like paint the moment I opened the back door.

Not old paint. Fresh paint, the sharp kind that gets in the back of your throat.

The sewing room is the old front parlor of our house, which was built in 1912 and has one room downstairs bigger than all the rest.

That was why I chose it, the year we moved in. A sewing room needs space for a cutting table.

I had painted it myself in 2007, a soft butter yellow. Tyler was six.

He helped me roll the bottom half of one wall and got more paint on himself than on the plaster. I left a tiny yellow handprint behind the door on purpose.

Now the room was pale gray. All four walls, the trim, the inside of the closet. The handprint behind the door was gone.

So were the pinholes where I had tacked up patterns for nineteen years. It looked like a waiting room.

My cutting table was gone. My machine was gone. There was a desk in the corner from the Walmart in Marion, still with the cardboard corners on it, and a rolling chair, and a laptop, and a lamp with a gooseneck.

I found the machine in its case in the basement, on top of the chest freezer.

I found the cutting table folded flat and leaning against the wall in the garage, behind the snowblower. My thread rack was in a laundry basket.

Sierra came down the stairs while I was standing in the doorway of that room.

She had her hoodie sleeves pulled over her hands. She looked at me and then at the wall and then at the floor.

“I needed an office,” she said. “Somewhere with a door. I figured you’d be okay with it, since you’re at school all day. I was careful with the machine. I wrapped it in a towel.”

I asked her who bought the paint. She said she had. Forty-one dollars at the hardware store, two gallons and a roller.

She said it like she was offering to pay me back for something I had lost.

Tyler came down behind her. He looked at me the way he used to when he was eight and had broken something.

“Mom,” he said, “it’s just paint. We can paint it back if you want. I’ll do it.”

I didn’t say anything to either of them. I went into the kitchen and started supper, because that is what my hands know how to do when the rest of me does not.