Just Like Home(78)

And then the words trailed off into silence, and the darkness in the dining room thickened even further, and a shiver climbed Vera’s spine.

There was one more thing she could be sure of: she hadn’t been meant to hear that.

She returned to her bedroom and she folded laundry, and she watched out the bedroom window, waiting for James Duvall to go out.



* * *



The inside of the shed was not what Vera remembered.

The last time she had been in here, she’d been talking to Hammett Duvall. He’d cleared the shed out and turned it into a makeshift office—a folding table with an old-fashioned typewriter on it, a folding cot in the corner, a camp chair beneath a battery-powered camping lantern hung from a hook on the wall. She could remember him clear as anything: sitting in that camping chair, setting his half-drunk warm beer on the floor between his feet so he could write down what she was saying about her father’s jokes.

Those jokes had made it into his book. Fish can be such gossips.

It was a big shed, a little larger than the dining room where Daphne had decided to die. Francis had constructed it with a garden in mind, imagining Daphne starting seedlings and bulbs inside. He’d added built-in cabinets and a long counter running along one wall, and a deep freestanding sink. It was supposed to be a place where she could build out the dreams that Francis imagined her having. It had ended up full of tools and spiders, and the garden had ended up as an expanse of knotgrass and bull thistles.

In the years since Vera’s last visit to the shed, it had changed. The hands of countless guests had transformed it into a livable place. The walls—formerly primer-white—had been painted a deep high-gloss green. The battery-powered lantern had been replaced by a single bulb that hung from the middle of the ceiling, connected to an extension cord that was stapled into place all the way to the outlet where it was plugged in. That was new, too, Vera realized—the shed had electricity, whether or not the county knew about it.

The sink had turned into an entire bathroom-corner, with an unconcealed toilet and a showerhead over a cement shower pan. The camp chair was gone, too, replaced by a threadbare pink recliner Vera didn’t recognize. The cot was still in its same corner, although the mattress on it looked to be more plush than the slim one Hammett had suffered on. Vera did a double-take as she realized why: it was her old mattress, the one her mother had replaced in anticipation of her arrival.

I’m sure he’ll find it inspiring, she’d said.

The rest of the space was filled with James Duvall. A toiletry kit hung from a nail in the wall, a string of pockets brimming with essentials. His clothes were folded and stacked on top of the counter: Y-front briefs, dark denim, faded tees and A-frame undershirts. A set of tools were laid out on a small gray folding table in the center of the room—a plane, a sanding block, a gouge with a dark handle. The peeling vinyl top of the folding table was blotched with paint and plaster. A jar of wet brushes sat next to the sink, bristle-side up, drying.

And surrounding it all, dominating three out of the four walls of the shed, James Duvall’s art stood sentinel.

Vera recognized the boards now that she was seeing them all together, now that she could see the raw materials. She recognized that faded, splintery wood, pressed her fingertip into the ragged hole where a nail had fixed one of them to its frame. The edge of the hole crumbled a little at her touch.

These boards had been part of the old front porch.

The porch her father had built. He had been the one who knew how to care for it. By the time Vera had left home, it had been wrecked by years of snow and salt, summer humidity and fall heat. It must have been a disaster by the time Duvall showed up. Half-rotted. A safety hazard, probably. Vera could only imagine.

It was good that it had been torn down and rebuilt. She knew that.

But seeing those old boards here, torn up and set aside for Duvall to use in his art, nauseated her a little.

She could see his method now. Boards were lined up along one wall for the most part in various stages of progress—raw, planed along the edges, sanded and smoothed, etched with deep vertical grooves. Painted and sculpted and painted some more, terraformed into rising layers that turned the topography of each one into a story.

It was good art. She couldn’t deny that, no matter how much it turned her stomach to see.

One board was stretched out across two sawhorses. She surprised herself by recognizing it instantly as the one she’d seen that morning. It was the longest of them all. Judging by the ragged ends of the other boards, this was the only one that Duvall had managed to save whole, without it splintering into halves or thirds during the process of tearing that porch apart. Vera took a step closer to it.

It didn’t look very different than it had that morning. She traced the grooves in the wood with her eyes, trying to find the thing she’d seen that morning. The thing that he hadn’t wanted her to see. The thing he’d wanted to hide from her.

There. At the place between a short groove and a long one, half-covered by the drying layer of gray paste that coated Duvall’s fingernails. She squinted, trying to make out what she was starting to recognize as words. Handwritten words.

GROWING UP SO FAST



Vera recognized that handwriting.

The door to the shed swung open, smacking into the wall with a bang. Vera whipped around. “You’re back.”

“Well, this is a surprise.” Duvall stepped inside, his movements languorous, his eyes bright with a curious kind of anger. He closed the door behind himself and leaned back against it. “I don’t recall inviting you in, Vera Crowder.”