The Playhouse at Both Houses

The night on the steps

I could have called my lawyer that night. I had her number on the refrigerator.

But I sat on those steps and thought about what a fight over a playhouse would cost, and every way I added it up, the bill landed on two little girls.

So I didn’t call anybody. I sat on the porch steps with them until the yard light came on and the cicadas got going in the hedge row.

Maisie leaned on one side of me and Pearl leaned on the other.

“Did Daddy take it because we were bad?” Maisie asked. She asked it in the flat voice she uses when she has been thinking about something for a while and has decided she already knows the answer.

“No, ma’am,” I said. “You weren’t bad. You were not bad one single bit. Grown ups do dumb things when they are hurting, and sometimes they don’t even know they’re doing them.”

Pearl wiped her nose on my sleeve. “Will the house be lonely?” she said. “It doesn’t know anybody over there. It doesn’t know that yard. It only knows our yard.”

I didn’t have an answer for either of them. I told them I loved them and we would figure it out, which is what you say when you don’t have an answer, and then I put them in the bath.

Archie and I had been married eleven years. He left in March.

Her name was Dawn, she was a respiratory therapist at the hospital in Salina, and I am not going to pretend I was gracious about it, because I was not.

The divorce went through the district court in Abilene on the Monday of that same week. It was quiet as those things go.

We split the house money, he took the shop tools, I kept the girls during the week, and he got every other weekend and Wednesday supper.

The summer he built it

Archie built that playhouse the summer Maisie turned three. Pearl was a year old and still crawling, and she spent most of that summer in a laundry basket in the shade watching her daddy work, while I brought out tea.

He was a framing carpenter, still is, on a crew that builds houses all over Saline and Dickinson County.

He could stand up a wall faster than anybody I ever saw. But he built that playhouse slow, like it was the most important job of his life.

He set the skids level with a four foot level and a pile of patio blocks. He framed it with the leftover studs from a job in Solomon.

He cut the little window out of a real window, a slider somebody had thrown out, and trimmed it down to fit.

When it was done he put Maisie in the doorway and made a pencil mark on the inside of the door frame at the top of her head.

He wrote her name and the year. Then he held Pearl up against the frame and did the same thing for her.

I had forgotten those marks were in there. When I watched that trailer go down the road, I thought about the window and the door and the five summers, but I did not think about the pencil lines once. That’s the honest truth.