The Playhouse at Both Houses

Why he took it

He talked for a long time. I sat down in the grass across from him with the playhouse door open between us.

Pearl climbed in his lap, blue and all, and Maisie finally came and sat beside me, close enough that our knees touched.

“Back in July,” he said, “I called on a Wednesday to see what you girls wanted for supper. Maisie answered. And I asked her, I said, are you excited to come stay at Daddy’s new house this weekend. And she said no.”

Maisie went stiff beside me. I put my hand on her back. “I didn’t mean it,” she said, small. “I just said it, Daddy. I didn’t mean it.”

“I know you didn’t, bug,” he said. “But you said there wasn’t anything to do here. You said there’s no playhouse and no swing and no dog and your room is in a different place, and you just wanted to stay home. And I hung up and sat in my truck in the hospital parking lot for an hour.”

He looked at me then. “Dawn’s place doesn’t have a thing in the yard. You saw it. Not a sandbox. Not a swing set. Nothing for a kid. And I was out every day framing somebody else’s house, coming home too tired to build one more thing.”

“So you took ours,” I said. I didn’t say it mean. I didn’t have any mean left in me right then, which surprised me. I just wanted to hear him say it plain.

“So I took ours,” he said. “I told myself it was mine because I built it. I told myself the decree said so. I knew it didn’t. I knew exactly what I was doing to you. And I did it anyway, because I was more scared of them not wanting to come than I was of you hating me.”

He looked at Pearl in his lap, at the blue on her nose.

“I thought if the playhouse was here, they’d want to come. That’s all it was. I thought I could make them want to see me. I didn’t know how else to do it.”

That was it. That was the whole reason. Not spite, not Dawn, not some plan to hurt me.

A man afraid his little girls would stop wanting to come see him, and so dumb with the fear that he hauled their playhouse off in front of them to try and fix it.

Nobody said anything for a while. A mourning dove was going somewhere in the neighbor’s yard. Down the street somebody was mowing.

I sat there in the sun with the paint drying on my hands and I could not, for the life of me, find the anger I had driven over with.

Maisie

It was Maisie who said something first. She got up off the grass and walked over and stood in front of her daddy with her brush still in her hand, and she looked at him with the same face she had when she asked if it was still ours.

“You didn’t have to take it,” she said. “We’d come anyway. We’d come for you, Daddy. I just said that on the phone because I was sad about everything. I’m not sad about you. You’re the part I’m not sad about.”

I have heard a lot of things in my life. I have heard my mother tell me she was proud of me on her last good day.

I have heard both my girls say their first words. But I don’t think I ever heard anything like the sound Archie made when Maisie said that.

He didn’t cry, exactly. Grown men from out here mostly don’t, not where anybody can see.

But his whole chest went in and out and he reached out and pulled her in, brush and all, and got a blue stripe across the back of that old gray shirt.

“I’m sorry, bug,” he said into her hair. “I’m so sorry. You too, Pearl. I took your house in front of you and that was wrong. That was about the wrongest thing I ever did. I’m going to make it right. I don’t know how yet, but I am.”

He looked over the top of Maisie’s head at me. “Leona. I’m sorry. You didn’t have to bring paint. You could’ve brought the sheriff. I’d have deserved it. You brought paint.” He shook his head like he couldn’t believe it.

“I brought it for them,” I said. I meant it as plain truth, not a jab, and I think he heard it that way.

“Not for you. But I’m glad you’re painting it, too. They need to see you do it. They needed to see you put something back.”