I drove out on a Thursday and he was standing in the driveway with his hands in his pockets like a man waiting for a verdict. He took me straight through to the back bedroom without saying anything, which I appreciated, and he pointed at the closet doorframe. My mother had never painted over it. Nine inches of pencil marks going up — my height, my brother’s, the dates in her handwriting, and then, in a different hand, three marks from 1999 labeled with the name of a child we lost at nineteen weeks, measured the way you’d measure a person, once a month, for the three months I couldn’t get out of bed. I had no memory of her doing that. He said he’d found it looking for the water shutoff and had to sit down on the floor.
He told me he’d walked into the kitchen not knowing and recognized his own brush marks on the inside of a cabinet door where he’d been sloppy in 1998, and the whole thing had come down on him at once. He said he’d made the offer before he’d thought about it, and then spent two weeks trying to work out whether that made him a sentimental old fool or something worse — a man buying his way back into a room. That’s why he’d called it a question about wallpaper. He said if I told him to withdraw he’d withdraw that afternoon, no argument, and he’d already half-decided I would. Then he said the marks weren’t his to be alone with, and that’s the only reason he’d picked up the phone.
I sat on the floor of that bedroom for a long time. What I kept thinking about was that my mother had outlived both the marriage and the reason for those three marks, and she’d never once mentioned them, and she’d repainted every other room in that house twice. She’d kept a wall for us. I said that out loud and he said she liked you sad better than she liked you gone, which is not a kind sentence but it’s the truest thing anyone’s said about my mother since she died. Then he apologized for it, and I told him not to, because I’d been waiting nine years for somebody to talk about her without the reverence.
He bought the house. I told him to. He asked if I wanted the doorframe cut out and I said no — leave it where it is, it’s a wall, it’s supposed to be a wall. We’re not together and we’re not going to be; he has a life and I have one and 2016 happened for reasons that haven’t changed. But once a year now, in April, I drive out and he makes bad coffee and I sit in the back bedroom by myself for twenty minutes and he doesn’t ask about it. Last spring I noticed he’d added a mark near the bottom, undated, and when I asked he said it was the dog. I don’t think it was the dog.
