The Playhouse at Both Houses

The second coat

We finished a little after five. The four of us, then five, in a little brick backyard in Salina, painting a playhouse the color of the sky so two little girls would have something of their own at both houses.

But the girls were laughing. That’s what I kept coming back to.

For the first time since March, both of my girls were laughing in a yard that had their daddy in it, and nobody was yelling and nobody was crying and nobody was being hauled off anywhere.

When the paint was dry enough to touch, Archie pulled the blue painter’s tape off the door frame, slow, a strip at a time.

Every pencil mark was still there, clean and gray against the bare wood, with a neat blue border around them.

Then he took his carpenter’s pencil out of his back pocket and he stood both girls up in the doorway, one at a time, heels flat on the floor, and he made a new mark for each of them.

He wrote the date beside it, though neither one of them had a birthday.

“New house,” he said. “Gets a new mark. That’s the rule now. Every time it moves, you both get measured.”

Pearl thought this was the best rule anyone had ever made up, and Maisie said it wasn’t a real rule, and then she stood up extra tall anyway.

Before we left, Dawn brought out a jar of paint pens from the house and asked if the girls wanted to sign it.

They wrote their names on the inside wall in big, crooked letters. Pearl signed her name and then drew a heart. Maisie signed hers, thought about it, and then wrote “Mom” and “Dad” underneath.

She didn’t write Dawn. Dawn saw that and didn’t say a word about it, and I liked her a little for that, which I had not planned on doing that day or any other day of my life.

The drive home

The girls fell asleep in the car before we were past the interstate. Pearl had blue paint on her cheek and her hand open on the seat.

Maisie had her head against the window and her mouth open, the way she sleeps when she’s worn all the way out.

I drove east into the dark with the windows cracked and the radio off.

The wheat stubble was black on both sides of the road and the elevator lights were coming on in every little town, one after another, the way they always do out here.

I thought about the pencil marks. Five years of my daughters’ lives written in gray on a piece of wood, and I had forgotten about them, and the man I was so angry at had been carrying them around in his head every single day.

I don’t know that I forgave him that night. I’m not sure forgiving is a thing you do in one night.

But I stopped hating him somewhere on that road between Salina and home, and I didn’t pick it back up.

The winter

The girls went to their daddy’s every other weekend that fall. Maisie went without complaining. Pearl went running.

Archie sent me a picture every time they went out to the playhouse, and I’d look at it in the post office parking lot before I started my route.

There was one of the two of them having a tea party in it in October, with a pumpkin on the little table.

There was one in November of the three of them inside it with a lantern, wrapped in sleeping bags, after Pearl begged to sleep in it for exactly fifteen minutes.

At Christmas Archie and I traded the girls off in the church parking lot after the Christmas Eve service.

We stood out by my car in the cold while they fought about whose present went in whose trunk, and he said, “I’m going to build one at your place. In the spring.”

His mother called me in January. I had not heard from her since the divorce.

She said Archie had told her about the playhouse, all of it, including the trailer on Tuesday, and she said she had not raised him to do a thing like that and she was ashamed.

Then she said she was proud of me, and she cried on the phone, and so did I.