The Playhouse at Both Houses

The door

Near noon he went to do the inside of the door frame.

The girls were working on the front by the window, and I was down on my knees getting the bottom edge of the side wall, and he had to duck down to go in.

He was in there maybe a minute. Then I realized I hadn’t heard the brush in a while, and I looked over, and he was just standing there in the doorway with the brush in his hand, dripping blue on the grass.

I got up and walked over to see what he was looking at.

Pencil lines ran up the inside of the door frame, all in his blocky carpenter’s printing. Maisie, 3. Pearl, 1. Maisie, 4.

Pearl, 2. On and on up the wood, every birthday, with the years beside them. Maisie’s last mark was just under my shoulder.

I had forgotten they were in there. I really had. When I watched that trailer go down the gravel road on Tuesday I thought about every single thing on that playhouse except the one thing that mattered most.

He hadn’t forgotten. I could see that on his face. He had been carrying those marks around for six months.

He knew to the inch where every one of them was, and he had been going to paint right over them, and he couldn’t do it.

“Don’t paint over those,” he said, quiet. It wasn’t to me, exactly. It was to himself, I think, or to the brush. “We’ll tape them off. I’ll tape them off. Nobody paints over those. Not ever.”

He pulled a roll of blue painter’s tape out of the bag and did it right then, one careful strip at a time, before he said another word.

Then he sat down on the grass beside the doorway, all at once, the way a man sits down when his legs quit on him.

He put the brush across the top of the open can. He put his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands.

The girls had seen it. Pearl came over first, with blue all down her arm, and put her hand on top of his head the way you’d touch a dog that might bite.

Maisie stayed where she was by the window, holding her brush up so it wouldn’t drip.

“Leona,” Archie said into his hands. “I need to tell you why I took it. I owe you that. I owe the girls that more than you.”

He looked up at Maisie. “Bug, you can hear this too. You’re old enough. You ought to hear it.”