Word Count: 382
It’s been twenty years, maybe ten since I’ve painted the bathroom ceiling. Almost twelve since he died. The man who left pencil marks around the hole where he helped put in a new lighting fixture, complete with a fan.
Now I remember, I did paint it since, but not over the marks. It must have been too soon to erase a man’s life with a paintbrush.
He was our neighbor. Always willing to help with whatever we ourselves didn’t know how to do. We shared gardens. He liked tilling the soil and planting the seeds. I liked weeding and gathering the harvest. There was a year when his plot was all vegetables, mine all a butterfly garden of flowers. The time he snuck giant zucchini under my cucumber leaves. I put a deer target in the midst of his corn.
I remember the day he put in the light. I’d gone over to ask about wiring. He read the instructions and wandered over to see what I’d done. I tried to stay out of his way but wanted to help. Then I noticed a huge gash on his forehead; he’d walked right into the overhead garage door I’d left open to only my height.
The ceiling is old-fashioned 70s swirls. I paint with a short bristled wide brush, feeling like Michelangelo, not wanting the mess of a roller and tray, welcoming the more personal feel, the slowness, the touching of the bristles to the paint. Putting off that decision of painting around or over the lines he made marking the measuring of the fixture.
With each swirl I get closer. I step from a chair up onto the counter, down to the top of the toilet. Move the chair into the bathtub and push paint into half-circles as if the ceiling was a canvas, faces appearing, joining in smiles. Inevitably, I come to his.
There’s that hesitation, that moment that brings back the phone call, the rush over there, the CPR I tried so hard to save him. These two pencil marks over my head are not him, just a small part of a lifetime. They can’t be whitewashed with paint.
I softly brush the wet paint over the swirl, over the marks. It doesn’t matter. I know they’re there.
