One•XXXIII•2

     On arriving home, he had spread out a tarpaulin on the porch floor, set up a ladder and then, after carefully cutting in the edges of the beadboarded ceiling with Dimity, he had poured some of the thick cream-colored paint into a pan and started coating a small area with a roller that [...]

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Part One•Section XXXIII•Paragraph 1

     After trading email addresses with the salesperson (he had seemed a nice enough guy, after all, who mentioned in passing that he played the French horn in a local chamber music ensemble), Rennie had carried two gallons of paint, one each of Rectory Red—which Ron, the horn player, had convinced him to take [...]

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Part One•Section XXXII•Paragraph1

  When he returned to the store to purchase the paint, Rennie had felt a pang of disappointment to discover that the salesperson was a curt, tanned, middle-aged man, meticulously dressed in a crisp, short-sleeved, Borrowed Light shirt, chinos and expensive-looking moccasins, rather than the young woman with the Folly Green eyes and gentle, mellifluous voice whose hand [...]

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Part One•Section XXXI•Paragraph 1

   Sitting on the front stoop, the dog and a Kilkenny beside him, Rennie had sorted through the binder that Arden had left on the kitchen counter for him.  It was filled with paint brochures, pages torn from magazines and tagged “whimsical paint finishes,” and little pinked squares of fabric; she had affixed to the [...]

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Part One•Section XXX•Paragraph 1

  Arden’s taste in decorating, as in all things, was unimpeachable (she held this to be a truth both self-evident and incontrovertible).  Having given the color scheme of the porch much consideration—tearing from magazines any image having a pleasing, nuanced palette; pinning swatches of fabric against one another and tacking them up on a corkboard in [...]

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