He believed a house said something about the people who lived in it. He believed you took care of what you owned, and you never let anyone tell you otherwise. Norah remembered being 9 years old, standing beside him while he replaced a busted step on this very porch. She'd asked him why he bothered. Nobody else on the street kept their porch that nice.
He'd looked at her for a long moment the way he did when he wanted a lesson to actually land somewhere. Because it's ours, he'd said, "Doesn't matter what anybody else does with theirs. You take care of what's yours and you do it right, and you never apologize to anybody for it. " She hadn't understood it then. Not really.
She understood it a little more now, standing in the same spot decades later. Still that same 9-year-old on the inside, no matter what her badge said about her age. We should get started, Norah finally said. The porch railings rotted through on the east side. I noticed it walking up.
He would have hated that, Vivien said, letting it get that bad. He didn't let it get that bad. He got sick. There's a difference. Vivien didn't answer that.
She just nodded and grabbed her keys off the counter. Grief had a way of turning into small arguments Norah had noticed ever since the funeral. Neither of them meant anything by it. It was just easier to be short with each other than to say out loud how much they still missed him. Some mornings, in ways that caught you off guard, they drove to the hardware store on Fifth, the same one from 20 years back, and spent 40 minutes picking out paint, brushes, a bag of galvanized nails, two rolls of sandpaper.
The man behind the counter was new, younger, didn't know them. That felt strange. There had been a time when everyone in that store knew their names. When their father's credit was good on a handshake alone. By the time they got back to the house, the afternoon sun had dropped low enough to throw long shadows across the yard.
Norah carried the paint cans up the porch steps. They clinked together softly, a sound that reminded her of being 7 years old, watching her father carry the same kind of cans up these same steps, whistling something tuneless under his breath. Vivien followed with a bag of brushes in one hand, the house keys jingling in the other. "Finally got everything on his list, " Norah said, setting the cans down by the door. Vivien smiled just a little.
He would have loved seeing us fix this place up. He would have supervised the whole thing and told us we were doing it wrong. That, too. For a moment, neither of them said anything else. The porch creaked under their feet, familiar and worn.
Somewhere down the street, a car passed slowly, then turned the corner and was gone. Excuse me. Both women turned toward the yard. Four officers stood at the bottom of the porch steps. Neither sister had heard the cruisers pull up, too absorbed in the small ceremony of coming home.