Burgundy from the collection Between Stations & Other Small Deaths available HERE.
I was painting houses that summer, working for a crew that didn’t ask questions about past experience or current sobriety. The foreman, A.R. Fisher, had teeth like scattered fence posts and kept saying we were three days behind schedule, though none of us knew what schedule he meant.
The job was a Victorian in Sussex, mint green with rotting trim. The owner wanted it burgundy. Every morning I’d climb the extension ladder to the highest peak, my shirt already damp by seven AM, and scrape ancient paint while wasps circled my head.
“You’re doing it wrong,” Fisher would shout from below. But he never said how to do it right.
On the fourth morning, I found Miranda sleeping in her car behind the house. She was the owner’s daughter, home from university. Her seat was reclined and an empty vodka bottle rolled against the brake pedal.
I tapped the window. She opened her eyes, then the door, and vomited on my boots.
“Sorry,” she said. “I couldn’t go inside. The key wouldn’t work.”
“The key always works,” I said. “It’s usually the person holding it that doesn’t.”
She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “That’s pretty wise for a house painter.”
“I’m not wise. I just know about keys.”
I helped her inside and went back to work. From my perch on the ladder, I watched her through windows, moving room to room like a ghost in her childhood home. By lunch, she was sitting on the back steps with a glass of water and two aspirin.
“My father’s dying,” she said when I came down. “Cancer. That’s why he wanted the house painted. Some kind of legacy thing.”
I nodded, unwrapping my sandwich.
“He keeps saying everything happens for a reason,” she continued. “Like there’s some divine plan where him dying makes sense.”
A wasp landed on my knee. I didn’t move.
“What do you think about that?” she asked.
“I think paint dries however it wants, divine plan or not.”
She laughed, but it wasn’t really a laugh.
That afternoon, Fisher fell off the ladder. Not my ladder, but the one on the west side of the house. He’d been drinking Tango to hide the whisky on his breath. His arm bent wrong when he hit the ground.
Miranda called the ambulance. While we waited, Fisher kept saying, “It wasn’t my fault. The ladder was defective.”
I checked the ladder later. Nothing wrong with it. Just gravity and bad choices having a conversation.
Miranda’s father came home from chemo the next day. I could see him through the windows too, skeletal in his armchair, watching game shows with the volume too high. Miranda brought him tea he didn’t drink.
“You missed a spot,” he called out to me once through an open window. I was on my ladder, painting under the eaves. “Up there, by the corner.”
I looked where he pointed. The spot was perfect, fresh burgundy paint gleaming in the sun.
“No sir,” I said. “That’s done right.”
He squinted at me. “Everything looks different from where you’re standing, doesn’t it?”
I thought about that while I painted. How Fisher blamed the ladder, how Miranda’s father blamed some cosmic plan, how Miranda blamed the key that worked just fine.
The job took two more weeks. Fisher never came back, and nobody replaced him. I finished the highest parts alone while the other guys did the ground floor. Miranda watched me from below sometimes, shielding her eyes from the sun.
“Aren’t you scared up there?” she asked once.
“Terrified,” I said. “But that’s not the ladder’s fault.”
The day we finished, Miranda’s father died. Not dramatically, just stopped breathing during Deal Or No Deal. Miranda found me packing up my brushes.
“He never got to see it completed,” she said.
“He saw it,” I told her. “He watched every day. He knew how it would look.”
She nodded, then handed me an envelope. Inside was a cheque and a note that said “The corner by the eaves still needs work.”
I gave the cheque back. “It’s finished,” I said. “Sometimes things are finished even if we don’t want them to be.”
Miranda stood there, holding the cheque, looking up at the house her father would never see again. The burgundy paint was darker than blood, darker than wine, darker than anything you could drink to forget your choices.
“I keep thinking,” she said, “if I’d been here instead of at uni, if I’d noticed the symptoms sooner…”
“The cancer happened because cells did what cells sometimes do,” I said. “Not because you weren’t watching them.”
She cried then, not like in movies, but how people really cry, with snot and hiccups and mascara making train tracks down her cheeks. I didn’t hold her. Some things you have to do alone.
A month later, I drove past the house. The burgundy paint looked almost black in the twilight, but I knew its true colour. Miranda’s car wasn’t there. The windows were dark. A FOR SALE sign stood out front, bright white and blameless.
I thought about stopping, about checking that spot by the eaves one last time. But I kept driving. Some things are finished, even if we’re not ready for them to be. Some ladders fall, some keys work fine, some paint dries exactly how it’s supposed to.
