After Elaine left with the cake, Mrs. Ek washed the two coffee cups and set them on the rack. The rack held only two cups at a time now. The other cups she kept in the cupboard with the saucers, in case someone came.
She went out the back door.
The back fence was at the far end of the yard, past the rhubarb that had gone to seed, past the place where the clothesline had been before she had it taken down. The fence was four boards high. Eric had built it the summer they bought the house, which was the summer their first dog had been a puppy, which was the summer it had rained almost every day in July.
She had painted it the first year after.
She stood at it now. The paint had held in some places and gone in others. Where the boards faced south the paint had powdered off in flakes the size of fingernails. Where the boards faced north it had held flat and even. Near the post she had once laid the paint on thick, the way a person who has not painted before lays paint on thick, and that patch had cracked into squares.
She had used Eric's brush. She had not known any other way to do it.
The brush was in the garage now. In a coffee can on the workbench, bristles up, where Eric had kept it. She had put it back there after the fence was done, with the paint still wet on the bristles, because she had not known what else to do with it that day. By the time she thought of cleaning it, weeks later, it was stiff. By the time she thought of throwing it out, months later, it had begun to be a thing that lived on the workbench. It was, in some way, where Eric had left it.
She had not gone into the garage often since.
She thought she would have liked, when she was younger, to have the kind of mind that gave names to things. She did not think she had it. She had a mind that kept things where they had last been. She had put the brush back in the can. She had not painted the fence again.
She turned to go in. The cold was in her hands now and the kitchen was a long walk back from the fence. She walked carefully because the ground was uneven in places where the dog had dug, fifty years ago, and where she had never filled the holes in, because she had not thought of it, because no one had been hurt by them.
At the back door she stopped and looked once more at the fence. She thought:
If I die in the winter, the fence will go another year without paint. If I die in the spring, someone will take it down.
The thought came without weight. She had been having such thoughts for some months. They did not frighten her. They were like the squares of cracked paint: a thing she noticed, accurate, not the whole picture.
She went in. She put on water for tea, although she did not want tea. She wanted the kettle's sound.