The Playhouse at Both Houses

The playhouse sat in the back corner of that yard, still white, still on its skids. It looked smaller there. It looked like a dog in a kennel that somebody had just dropped off and driven away from.

Maisie ran straight past her daddy and went to it and put both hands flat on the door. She did not open it.

She just stood there and touched it, and then she turned around and looked at him with that suspicious face of hers.

“It’s still ours, right?” she said. “Even over here, it’s still ours? It’s not hers?” She didn’t even look at the house when she said hers. She didn’t have to. Everybody in that yard knew who she meant.

Archie opened his mouth and nothing came out of it. He looked at me, and I could see him wondering if I had put her up to it.

I hadn’t. Maisie has never needed anybody to put her up to anything.

“Dawn’s at work,” he said finally, to me and not to Maisie. “She works a twelve today. She’s off at seven. She said to tell you.”

He swallowed. “She said to tell you the girls are welcome. Any time.”

I didn’t say anything about Dawn. I walked over and set the two cans of paint down in the grass beside the playhouse.

Then I picked up a brush and held it out to him handle first, the way you hand somebody a knife.

“The girls picked blue,” I said. “Sky blue. We got two gallons. That ought to be enough for two coats if nobody paints the dog. Grab a roller. You know how to cut in better than anybody.”

He looked at the brush for a long time. Then he took it.

Blue

For a good while after that nobody talked much. Archie pried the cans open with a screwdriver from his pocket and stirred them, and I poured the tray, and the girls stood in their overalls bouncing on their toes waiting for somebody to say go.

Maisie was in her yellow overalls and Pearl was in her pink ones.

They had matching brown pigtails I’d done that morning in the bathroom with a brush and a spray bottle, which took me twenty minutes and nearly cost me my religion.

Pearl painted herself about as much as she painted the wall. She got blue on her overalls, blue on her elbow, blue on the tip of her nose somehow.

Archie looked at the blue on her nose and something in his face came loose for just a second.

Maisie did the trim around the window like she was in church, slow and careful with her tongue between her teeth.

She did not want to make a single mistake on it. She wanted that window to be perfect, and she went over it four times.

Archie worked the high spots near the roof so the girls didn’t have to stand on anything.

He did it the way he does everything with his hands, quick and clean and without thinking, and he still cut in a straighter line than any of us.

“It looks like ours now,” she said. “It looks like it’s from our house.”

Then she looked around at the chain link and the maple and the brick, and she said, “But it’s here,” like she was working something out in her head.

“It’s from both houses,” I said. “Same as you. You’re from both houses now, and so is it. Wherever you go, it’s yours.”

Archie stopped rolling for a second when I said it. He didn’t look up, but he stopped.