The Playhouse at Both Houses

Wednesday

I carry a rural route out of the Abilene post office, a hundred and eight miles a day of gravel and blacktop, three hundred and some boxes.

You get a lot of thinking done on a route. Most days that’s a blessing. That Wednesday it wasn’t.

I thought about calling Archie and telling him exactly what he was. I thought about driving to Salina and standing in that woman’s yard until somebody came out.

I thought about Pearl sitting in the dead grass with her doll, and that was the one that kept coming back.

At about the Talmage turnoff I started thinking about something else. I thought about Pearl’s question, whether the house would be lonely over there.

It sounded like nonsense from a six year old, but it kept sitting there in my chest like it meant something.

It wasn’t the house that would be lonely over there. It was the girls.

They’d go to that yard every other weekend, to a house that smelled like somebody else, and they would find their own playhouse standing there like a hostage.

Unless it was theirs over there too. Unless they walked into that yard and saw something they had made with their own hands, and their mama’s, and their daddy’s, and it belonged to them no matter whose grass it was standing on.

By the time I got back to the post office I had an idea. I didn’t like it much.

It meant being nice to a man who had just hauled a piece of my children’s childhood down the road on a trailer. But I couldn’t get loose of it.

Wednesday was Archie’s supper night. He came at five and took the girls to the Pizza Hut in Abilene, and I didn’t say a word about the playhouse when he picked them up, and he didn’t either. He looked like a man waiting to be shot.

When he dropped them off, Maisie went straight in without hugging him. Pearl hugged him, but she did it fast, like you hug an uncle.

I watched him walk back to his truck in the yard with his shoulders down, and part of me was glad.

The paint

Thursday after work I took the girls to the hardware store on Buckeye.

The girls went straight to the paint chips like they were candy, and they pulled out every card in the rack, and the lady at the counter didn’t even mind.

“What are we painting?” Maisie asked, with about forty paint cards fanned out in her hands like a poker player. She was suspicious. Maisie is always suspicious. She gets that from me, and from my mother before me.

“The playhouse,” I said. “At Daddy’s new place. If he says yes. I thought maybe we’d go over Saturday and give it a new color so it knows it’s still yours, even over there.”

Pearl looked up at me. Her whole face changed. “So it won’t be lonely,” she said, and I said yes, so it won’t be lonely, and I had to look at the drawer pulls for a minute before I could talk again.

They picked a sky blue. Pearl picked it, really, and Maisie argued for a while about a green and then gave in.

Pearl said the blue was “like outside,” and I thought that was about the best reason for a color I ever heard.

Two gallons of exterior latex, forty six dollars a gallon, plus a tray, two rollers, three brushes and a box of stir sticks.

I paid a hundred and nine dollars and change, which was more than I had planned to spend that week by about a hundred and nine dollars.

In the parking lot I sat in the car with the girls buckled in the back and I texted Archie.

“Saturday at ten,” I wrote. “The girls and I want to bring paint for the playhouse. They picked a color. Is that all right?”

The three dots came up and went away. They came up again and went away again.

The girls were singing in the back seat and I just sat there with the engine running watching those dots for the better part of an hour.

Then my phone buzzed. “Okay,” it said. Nothing else. Just okay. I showed it to Maisie and she read it twice, and then she said “Hm,” exactly the way my mother used to, and put the phone back in my hand.