“The can was just sitting there on the steps, lid off, brush balanced across the rim like whoever it was had only just stepped away.”
I stood on the front walk and looked at it for probably a full minute before my brain caught up to what I was seeing. The ladder was still leaning against the porch post. The drop cloth was tucked around my hydrangeas the exact same careful way Donald used to do it when he was painting anything near the garden. He always said you had to treat the flowers like they were sleeping. You worked around them quiet.
I don’t know why that’s the detail that got me. The drop cloth. But it did.
Let me back up a little. Donald built that porch swing in the spring of 1981, the year after we moved into this house. I remember watching him work from the kitchen window while I was canning tomatoes. He had this way of measuring twice and then measuring a third time just to be sure, and I used to tease him about it. He’d laugh and say he’d rather be slow and right than fast and wrong. That was just who he was about everything, not just woodwork.
He passed in the spring of 2011. Heart attack. One of those things that happens fast and leaves you standing in a hospital hallway trying to figure out why the fluorescent lights are so loud all of a sudden. We had been married thirty-one years.
The first Good Friday after he was gone, I came home from the noon service at First Lutheran and the swing was freshly painted. Glossy white, still faintly tacky at the armrests. I remember pressing my finger to it just to confirm it was real. I thought maybe one of our sons had done it, but when I called Thomas he said it wasn’t him, and our younger one, Ray, was living in Colorado by then. I asked around a little. Nobody admitted to anything.
So it just became a thing that happened. Every year on Good Friday, I’d walk to the noon service and come home to a freshly painted swing. For a while I tried to stay home and watch for who it was, but that felt wrong somehow. Like if I caught them, they’d stop. And I didn’t want it to stop. I needed it, honestly. More than I could explain to anybody without sounding a little unhinged.
I’ve tried to describe to my friend Paulette what it felt like coming home to that swing every year. She’s a good listener but I could tell she thought I was maybe reading too much into it. She’d say things like, oh, what a sweet neighbor, and I’d say yes but also I haven’t been able to figure out which neighbor for going on a decade now. And she’d get a little quiet after that.
The thing is, there are maybe six or seven houses close enough to mine that someone could get to my porch and back without being too obvious. I know all those families. I’ve brought them Christmas cookies and borrowed their extension cords and watched their dogs when they traveled. None of them ever said a word. Every year, nothing. Just the swing, gleaming, smelling like fresh paint and something I didn’t have a word for. I don’t know. Purpose, maybe. Like the house was still being taken care of.
This year Good Friday fell on a rainy day, which is not unusual for April in this part of Ohio. I walked to church in my good coat with an umbrella and sat in my usual spot, third pew on the left. Pastor Dennis started the service at noon like always. But around twelve-thirty the rain picked up hard, really hammering on the roof of the sanctuary, and he decided to cut it short. He said something kind about how God understood, and we all laughed a little, and by quarter to one I was walking home.
I want to say I had some feeling about what I was about to find. I actually almost turned around on the corner of Maple and Vine to go to Paulette’s instead, just to visit, but I kept going. I think I was just cold.
I came up my front walk and there it was. The ladder.
The drop cloth over the hydrangeas. The open paint can on the steps. I stood there in my good coat getting rained on and I just looked at everything for a long moment.
The swing wasn’t finished. Half of it was fresh white, bright and clean, the other half still dull and weathered from last year. Whoever was doing this had been in the middle of the job when the rain got too heavy, or when they heard me coming, or both.
I walked up the porch steps and that’s when I noticed the sticker on the paint can lid. The hardware store on Route 9 puts an account sticker on anything bought on store credit. Name, account number, date of purchase. I’ve bought things there on account myself. The sticker was right there, slightly wet at the corner but perfectly readable.
The name on it was Gerald Foss.
I actually said it out loud on my empty porch. Just his name, out loud, to nobody.
Gerald Foss is eighty-one years old. He and his wife Margaret lived across the street from us from 1984 until Margaret passed in 2019. They didn’t have children of their own. I used to take them food when Margaret’s health was bad in those last couple of years, and Gerald would sit at the kitchen table and we’d drink coffee and not always talk that much, which was fine. He moved to Sycamore Glen, the assisted living place out on County Road 7, about two years after she was gone. His nephew handles his house, which has been empty since then.
Gerald and Donald used to sit on that swing together every summer Sunday after church while I made lunch. That’s not something I think about very often because it’s one of those memories that’s nice and painful at the same exact time. They’d sit out there for an hour sometimes, just talking quietly about whatever men their age talked about. Baseball maybe. I’d hear them laughing sometimes from the kitchen and I’d think, okay, this is a good life.
Here is what I have been trying to think through since I came inside and changed out of my wet coat. Gerald Foss is eighty-one and he lives at Sycamore Glen, which is a twelve-minute drive from my house. Every Good Friday for fourteen years, he has arranged to get himself a can of paint, get out to my house, set up a ladder, protect my hydrangeas, and repaint a swing that his friend built.
He would have been sixty-seven the first time he did it. He never said anything. Not once. Not a Christmas card, not a phone call, not a word when I brought food to his house all those years ago.
I pray for Gerald every night. He’s on my list of people whose health I ask God to look after. I have been praying for the person who painted that swing for fourteen years without knowing those were the same prayer.
I called Sycamore Glen after I changed my clothes. The woman who answered said Gerald was at dinner and asked if I wanted to leave a message. I said no, I’d call back. Then I sat in Donald’s chair in the living room and looked out the window at my half-painted porch swing in the rain and thought about what I was going to say when I did call back.
I still haven’t figured it out. What do you say to someone who has been quietly, anonymously keeping a piece of your grief alive and glossy for fourteen years? Thank you seems like too small a word. And I’m also a little worried that if I say anything at all, something about it will change. He’ll feel seen in a way he maybe didn’t want to be seen, and I’ll have taken something from him that he gave freely without needing credit.
Part 4
Paulette says I should absolutely call him. She says he probably wants to know I know.
Maybe she’s right. Paulette usually is.
But I also keep thinking about Donald, measuring things twice and then a third time, just to be sure. And Gerald, sitting on that swing every summer Sunday, laughing about something I couldn’t quite hear from the kitchen.
I’m going to finish the painting myself tomorrow if it’s dry enough. I found his brush in the drop cloth and I know how Donald wanted it done. I’ll do it careful, work around the flowers.
Then I’ll call.
