When I finally got up, my slacks were soaked through.
And I’d decided something.
I wasn’t going to call that spray crew in Worthington and yell at them.
I wasn’t going to call Brad back and say all the hard things I had ready on my tongue.
I was going to paint it back.
I went inside and found Arlo’s old Stanley tape measure in his desk drawer. And at eleven o’clock at night, I went back out and measured that barn by flashlight.
Seventy-two feet long. Thirty-six feet wide. Sixteen feet up the walls to where the roof starts. And the big gambrel ends going up another twenty feet to the peak.
I sat at the kitchen table with a pencil and the back of an envelope from the electric co-op.
I’m not a painter. But I’ve kept the books on this farm for thirty-six years. I can do arithmetic.
It came to somewhere around forty-five hundred square feet of siding. Not counting the doors.
Then I took a long, hot shower. And I slept four hours in my own bed, next to Arlo’s empty pillow.
It was the best sleep I’d had since August.
At seven o’clock Friday morning, I was sitting in the parking lot of Runnings farm store in Marshall when they unlocked the doors.
The paint counter is run by an older man named Gene Haugland. He’s been mixing paint there since before they built the new store. He’s sold Arlo fence paint and stock tank paint for twenty years.
“Carol,” Gene said when he saw me. “How’s Arlo?”
“Working hard,” I said. “Gene, I need barn paint. Red. The real red.”
I slid my electric bill envelope across the counter with all my numbers on it.
Gene looked at it. He pushed his glasses up on his nose.
“That’s the old Jensen barn,” he said. “On the county road.”
“It was red until Tuesday.”
He knew. Of course he knew. Everybody who drives that county road had gone past it. And half of them had probably called Gene to ask what in the world was going on out at the Jensen place.
“Rough-sawn boards drink paint like a dry cow drinks water,” Gene said. He tapped my envelope with his finger. “Figure a hundred and fifty, two hundred square feet a gallon. One coat. Going red over fresh gray, one good coat’ll cover. If you back-brush it.”
“So thirty gallons?”
“Thirty, if nobody spills.” He looked at me over his glasses. “Get forty. You’ll have kids, I’m guessing?”
I hadn’t told him that.
I hadn’t told anybody that. I hadn’t even thought it yet.
“You’ll have kids,” Gene said again.
And he started pulling five-gallon pails off the pallet.
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