Chapter Twenty-Two
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
“I’ve been thinking about it,” Macon said to me a few days later at work. “I’m going to paint my kitchen yellow.”
“Really?” I no longer remembered that I’d left his house feeling angry and envious. I only felt a stir of excitement that my vision was about to become a reality.
“Yeah. Ever since you said it, I can picture it clearly.”
I straightened. It felt good to be useful. I hadn’t felt that in a while.
“But is it okay? I feel like I’m stealing your idea.”
I waved away his concern. “That’s what I would paint that kitchen. I have no idea what my own future kitchen will look like. Steal away.”
Several hours later, though, it was still on my mind. How charming it would look with the correct shade of yellow. How repellent it could look with the wrong one. “Are you going to paint your kitchen soon?” I asked.
He nodded, slowly at first but then faster as he considered it further. “I think so.”
“May I help?”
He seemed surprised. “You want to help me paint?”
“Yeah.” I had surprised myself, too, but this was the most interest I’d felt in anything since I’d stopped dating. Also, I couldn’t tell him that I was concerned he’d pick an ugly color. That I was concerned for the integrity of his house.
He’d been looking at me askance, but his gaze sharpened. “You’re serious, aren’t you?”
“Of course I am.”
“Have you ever even painted a room? Since you live in an unpaintable apartment?”
“I helped Brittany with her house. And Cory’s friends held a lot of painting parties.” The blankness of his response prodded me to elaborate. “That’s when you invite your friends over to paint the walls of your new place, and you pay them in pizza and beer, and supposedly it’s fun.”
“That sounds horrible.”
“It is . And everyone else would always get drunk, and somehow the painting was always left to me. And I would do it!” A thought occurred to me. “That’s probably why I was invited to so many parties.”
“You’re too responsible.”
“I am.”
“If it’s so bad, then why do you want to help?”
“Because it sounds better than sitting alone in my sad apartment.”
He frowned, but a man interrupted us, wanting to replace a lost card. Macon asked to see his ID, and while the guy was digging it out, Macon shook his head. “I don’t know. You’d be doing me another favor, and I still owe you for watching Edmond.”
“You’re not in my debt. I was helping out a friend. You’d do it for me.”
“You don’t have a cat.”
“Come on.”
He threw up his hands. “Okay. I’m not going to stop you from painting my kitchen.”
“ Helping paint. This isn’t a painting party.”
His expression turned vexed as he snatched the driver’s license out of the man’s hands a little too aggressively.
“When do you want to start?” I asked as soon as we were alone again.
“Sunday?”
“If we start then, we won’t be able to finish it over the weekend.”
“My kitchen isn’t big. It won’t take two days to paint.”
I explained that he was forgetting about the prep work: patching, sanding, cleaning, taping, priming. More importantly, he hadn’t factored in the time it would take to select the color. “But we’re painting it yellow,” he said, baffled. “A buttery, sunshiny yellow, like you said.”
“You’re underestimating how many shades of yellow exist in the world.” I did a quick search. “Okay, so the hardware store down the road closes at seven. That gives us plenty of time to pick up samples after work.”
“You mean tonight ?”
“Do you have anything else going on?”
“I might,” he grumbled.
A few hours later, I was thrusting paint sample cards into his hands.
After I helped him eliminate the most obvious nos, he was still left holding dozens of cards.
“Tape these to your kitchen walls,” I said, removing another that was too pastel.
“Move them around and study them in different types of light. Take down the rejects as you spot them and keep narrowing it down until you’re left with only a few that you like.
I’ll come over before work on Saturday and help you pick the right one. ”
“Why before work?”
“So I can see them in the daylight. That way you’ll be ready to buy the paint after work, and then we can start early the next morning. In the meantime, you should spackle any holes and repair any cracks.”
He seemed overwhelmed. “How do you know all this?”
I felt gleeful at being more knowledgeable about something than him for once, and I lectured him on small rollers versus the regular size. “The small ones are so lightweight that your arms don’t get tired. You’ll have to tape, but then you won’t have to cut in, so it’s worth it.”
He agreed to try them only to shut me up. But like any good librarian, he made up for his ignorance with diligent research. By Saturday morning, his walls were prepped and cleaned, he’d created a list of remaining supplies to purchase, and four paint sample cards were taped up.
I read them aloud. “Midsummer Magic, Sun-Kissed, Rise and Shine, Goldilocks.”
“Which one do you like?” he asked, handing me a mug of green tea with honey.
I enjoyed all varieties of caffeine, but this was a particular favorite.
Unsurprisingly, he’d been the one to hook me on it in the first place.
I blew across the surface and took a sip.
Also unsurprisingly, his tasted better than mine.
“They’re all good,” I said, admiring the colors.
His shoulders relaxed, and I could tell that my approval pleased him.
“Maybe Goldilocks is a touch too gold. And Sun Kissed is a tad bland?”
He took them off the wall.
“Rise and Shine,” I said. “That’s the one.”
“That’s the one I was leaning toward, too.”
I removed the card and slapped it onto his chest. “Done.”
The unexpected contact startled us both. I’d never just… touched his chest before. He made a whole production of slowly untaping the card from his shirt while giving me a hard look.
I shrugged because I honestly didn’t know why I’d done it.
He tutted with mock disappointment. “Rise and Shine it is.”
Macon was an early riser, despite his grumpiness upon arriving to work every day.
(“My mood has everything to do with leaving my house, and nothing to do with the morning itself,” he once told me.) I still wasn’t sleeping well, so we made plans for me to return early again on Sunday.
I’d wanted to go with him to the hardware store to pick up the paint and supplies, but I’d spent our whole Saturday shift trying to think up an excuse to join him and never did.
We both laughed when he greeted me at the door.
We were wearing the same shirt, a gray Colburn County logo tee that we’d received as a holiday “gift” from our employer two years earlier.
Other notable gifts included brown paper lunch sacks that each contained a pitiful orange and five chestnuts, and logo coffee mugs that we were ordered to stop using a few months later because they turned out to be contaminated with lead.
“Merry Christmas,” I said.
“Humbug,” he said.
He’d already taped around the cabinets, windows, and trim.
Everything was ready and waiting for me, including breakfast. He’d texted an hour earlier: If you value my sanity, please don’t eat another Pop-Tart.
I’ll make something for us. He’d seen them on my kitchen counter and had been pestering me about it ever since.
“I only bought one box,” I said, heading for the little table in his dining room.
“Desperate times and all that.” Then I gasped.
Two plates were piled with matching heaps of home fries and tofu scramble. “This is so nice. Thank you.”
He set down another mug of tea in front of me. “You’re welcome.”
I moaned at the first mouthful of scramble—peppers, spinach, onions, and herbs. “I assume these are all from your garden?”
“Yeah. Are the peppers okay? They were still in my freezer from last year. I’m trying to use everything up before I fill it again this summer.”
“Everything’s delicious. I can’t wait to see what you make for me tomorrow morning.”
“I’d be happy to feed you again tomorrow morning.”
My fork paused halfway to my mouth. “I wasn’t serious.”
He shrugged. “I was.”
And he did seem content, watching me tuck in.
I thought I understood, though. No part of me blamed Cory or was angry with him, but it had always made me sad not to be able to cook for him.
Not to be able to share in the preparation and presentation and pleasure of a good meal.
I also suspected—so perhaps I did blame him a bit—that this had held me back.
Although my diet wasn’t usually as unhealthy as it had been lately, I might have made more of an effort in general if we could have shared our meals.
The want and need to feed the people we cared about was primal.
It was why families gathered for dinner, why coworkers baked each other rum cakes. And tofu scrambles.
Macon fought with me about cleaning up afterward. “You can’t not let me help,” I said.
“It’s okay. I’m weird about dishes. I like them done a certain way.”
“We’re librarians. We all like things done a certain way. Tell me how you do them, and I can help.” I started to put a plastic lid into his dishwasher, and he made a strangled noise. I held it up. “This?”
“No plastic in the dishwasher.”
I set it back down on the counter. “Got it.”
Soon I learned which bar of soap was for hands and which was for handwashed dishes (I’d guessed wrong before), which dishes needed to be dried immediately (normally just the cast iron, but today everything because we had to remove it from the room), and how to start the dishwasher (with a scoop of unlabeled powder).
Then we moved the last few remaining items into the dining room and set out the drop cloths. It was finally time to roll the primer.