Larry’s plaintive murmurs drift up from the pullout sofa, Sam’s joyous croaks chiming in from his summer bed on the front porch. I keep to the edge of the stairs to silence the creak, my ear cocked after each step for any variation in the snores’ timbre and pitch but I hear none. I tiptoe through the living room though I needn’t bother. Larry lies in a fetal clench with a rust velour seat cushion, the blankets low enough on his hips to reveal pale blue boxers under his white T-shirt. In the kitchen, my head hits Sylvia’s macramé lampshade as I reach across the table to snatch my K-way from a chair. I tuck a strawberry Pop-Tart into my pouch and enter the addition. The room, with its newly dug cinder-block basement and west-facing window, is cool and smells of sawdust. Pillows of pink fibreglass insulation in white plastic bags are stacked against the far wall studs. A neat pile of dust, scrap wood and nails sits in the middle. Sam’s tool belt hangs over a rod in the closet. I cross the plywood floor, open the new red door and jump onto the clumpy dirt. The sky is shifting from grey to pink.
The addition is Sam’s idea, announced to Nicky and me as a family project at Christmas. With Vi here it makes some sense but in two years Nicky and I will likely be off to university or college and Sam won’t need more space.
“Makes for a better house. More proportionate,” Sam says to silence anyone who asks.
What is more important is that Nicky and I help so that we’ll learn how and because the house is ours too or might someday be. Nicky pitched in from the beginning, his bent neck patterned with knotted jute shadows as he and Sam pored over the blueprints. Sam accepted each excuse I gave when he suggested tasks, but once the walls went up he got adamant so I’ve agreed to paint the boards he is using to cover the outside. Painting is easy and I can do it away from interference — or so I thought.
Last Saturday, Sam and Nicky took the Dodge to pick up the planks from a lumberyard and piled them under an orange plastic tarp beside the small barn we call the garage. When I came home from the Trout Club, Sam showed me the paint and a red milk crate full of supplies. I waited until my next day off while Sam was at work before I wrestled the sawhorses out behind the garage where Sylvia’s vegetable garden used to be and laid a long board across them. I flipped the milk crate on top of spread newspapers for a table. I placed a brush, a coffee can full of Varsol, some rags, a screwdriver, a hammer and a stir stick in a semicircle around the open paint can, stood back to admire the arrangement, then got to work.
The boards took longer than I thought and I got to counting the strokes and measuring the paint, saturating the brush to make each dip last. I propped each plank against the garage wall when I finished one side.
I wiped at my brow with my forearm, careful to hold the paintbrush away from my body. A slow blue drop lengthened from the tip of the brush. Before it could detach and aim for my bare leg, I flicked my wrist and flung the paint onto the grass.
An ache developed between my shoulder blades as I bent over the sawhorses and stroked the sopping brush up and down. Some paint bubbled but the grain absorbed almost all. I plunged the brush back into the can, wiping the drips on the rim. Blue splashed on the crisp brown grass.
When Sam’s hand dropped on my shoulder I jerked the brush toward myself and a splotch hit my thigh. I hadn’t heard the truck. I dipped a rag in Varsol and scrubbed a burn into my skin as the paint dissolved.
Sam bent and plucked a blue hank of lawn. The top of his head gleamed a burnished kidney. He’d combed pomade through what was left of his wavy hair and it shone. Around his jean shorts he’d slung his cowhide belt, heavy with tools.
“Your brush is too wet and your paint is sloppy.”
“What’s the big deal? They’re painted and they look fine.”
“They don’t look fine. We’ll see brush marks and drips and the knots need to be treated so sap doesn’t bleed through. I should have showed you. It’s my own fault.”
I tossed the rag onto the newspapers. Watery blue liquid spread across the print.
“Your set-up is sloppy too. Don’t just use the coffee cans for thinner; pour the paint in, one-third full. Then you can press the brush against the side to remove the excess, instead of against the brim of the can and spilling everywhere. But before that, you should sand each board and treat the knots. This isn’t easy.”
I didn’t want him to say what he was going to say next.
“If you do something right the first time, you won’t have to do it again. And besides,” he added by way of a joke, “my way, you’ll get more paint on the boards than yourself.”
I’ve only worked one evening since then and my production speed was considerably slower. I followed Sam’s every instruction to the letter — shaking then stirring the paint until it had the consistency of heavy sweet cream, adding citronella to make it bugproof, gluing a paper plate to the bottom of the can — before I remembered that I was supposed to prep the wood. I sanded the surface and shellacked the blemishes and knots of one board then had time to apply only one coat before it got too dark. Sam didn’t say anything about quantity or the quality of the job so I took it I had done okay.
A thick morning mist coats the back of the yard and goose bumps rise on my legs. Long grass shot through with purple-whiskered thistles crowds the edges of the lawn. Split-rail fencing and four maple trees separate our property from a hilly field to the north. Beyond that are farmhouses, ranch bungalows and some mansions. Apple orchards and more fields. Our closest neighbours are middle-aged couples like the childless Fat and Terese Palmer, who have the town’s only functioning outhouse, and Kipper and Shirl McDonald, none of whose five kids, including the one who is a former convicted pyromaniac, lives at home.
What would Sylvia think of the addition? Is an extra room enough? Would Sylvia recognize our green-shingled house sheathed with blue board-and-batten?
The dreams of Mother catch in my throat. Without swallowing, I stride across the yard to where a narrow path cuts through the long grass. I stamp to provoke the grasshoppers into the scattershot flight I love but they cling in torpor to the swaying blades and my moccasins end up drenched in dew.
I skirt around Fat Palmer’s outhouse through an empty lot then down the dirt hill that leads into Middle Street. Apple Ford has five streets: Front, Middle and Back run north-south while Victoria and Elizabeth go east-west. Front, Middle and Back have official names but nobody uses them and there are no signs.
Above a rise of lilacs on my right, a fence sags. Beyond that lies a shorn field, its hay gathered into rolls that loom in the vapour. There is only the clap of my feet in the quiet of no cars. I walk by blank-windowed red-brick houses until I reach the culvert over old Mrs. Brant’s stream. The water flows from a pipe I remember not from the times I drank as a child when shortcutting between Front and Middle Street but from kneeling on the sodden grass after leaving Rick’s that first night, when I mashed my lips against the cold lead and water shot over the ends of my hair, down my neck, into my blouse. I haven’t drunk here since, but this morning I’m not coming for the pipe.
I hop off the culvert to the far side of the path and walk across ground mushy under dead leaves and needles to a maple as tall as the one outside my bedroom window. I press my belly against its trunk and stretch, my fingertips straining to stroke the tip of the seam I can’t see. This scar from a lightning-severed branch is as mine as if I wear it on my own skin. With the dreams of Mother skittering over me I need even a moment of my hands on this old electric wound. As I charge the dreams, fixing them clear in my mind, I hear the urgent ring of the railroad-crossing signal south on Front Street. I lean harder into the bark, wishing to be crouched on the embankment beside the tracks when the train passes, its sweating oil movement shaking through me, embracing me in calm.
With a jolt, I let my arms fall free and head back down Mrs. Brant’s driveway and north on Front Street to