Thirty Quilters and a Red Barn Door

It’s Only Paint

I didn’t go home after I saw it. I went in and did Mom’s hair like I did every Friday, at her kitchen table with a towel around her shoulders and the radio on low.

She didn’t bring it up. I washed and set her hair and she told me about her tomatoes and a woman from church having her hip done. Her hands stayed folded in her lap the whole time.

When I had her under the hood dryer, I sat down across from her and turned it off for a minute so she could hear me.

“Mom,” I said, “did you know Tammy was going to have them paint over your quilt?”

She looked out the window at the barn. I had never noticed before how straight that window looked at the hayloft door. You could not see anything else from that chair.

“No,” she said. “I didn’t know. I saw it yesterday afternoon, when they were rolling it.”

“Did you say anything to her?”

“What would I say?” she said. “It’s Neal’s barn now. It’s their place. They can paint it any color they want.”

“Mom, that was yours. That was you and Dad.”

She reached over and turned the dryer back on herself. Then she patted my knee and said, “It’s only paint, Kendra.” A minute later, under the noise of the dryer, she said it again, “It’s only paint,” like she was telling herself.

I drove home that afternoon with my jaw so tight my teeth hurt. I wanted to call Tammy so badly I had the phone in my hand twice at stoplights.

I didn’t call her. The barn was Neal’s now, and Mom had told me plain as day that it was only paint.

If I went and made a fight out of it, Mom would be the one who had to live across the yard from that fight every single day. I could go home to town. She could not.

I did call Neal. He was out chopping first crop that whole week, putting up haylage while the weather held, and he had been in the field from sunup until long after supper. He hadn’t been home when the painters did the hayloft side.

“I didn’t know she told them to do the door,” he said. His voice was flat and tired. “I came in last night and it was done. I don’t know what to tell you, Kendra. I should have looked. I should have said something before they started.”

“Did you say anything after?”

He was quiet so long I thought the call had dropped.

“I asked her why,” he said finally. “She said it looked too country, same thing she told you. And then she said, what did I want, for her to have them sand it off? And I didn’t have an answer. You can’t unpaint a barn.”

That was true. I hung up and sat in my car outside my house and cried for the first time in a long time.