Free Maud's House by Sherry Roberts

Missouri and the Moniques and Todds from Manhattan. It got to the point where he ran in the opposite direction when someone even said the word “camera.” Finally, George shot his own photograph of the house, printed it up on postcards, and displayed the postcards next to a locked, slotted box on the porch. On the box was a sign:
    POSTCARDS 50 CENTS
    HONOR SYSTEM
    NO NEED TO RING THE BELL
    WE TRUST YOU
    During my George Period, as Wynn the art expert calls it, the house took a turn for the worse. I wasn’t painting like I once did. The painting I did while living with George somehow didn’t seem to fit the house. The house stopped changing. Scenes began to fade. Fewer people came. And then George made that lethal suggestion at the dinner table: the Whitewash Proposal. When the pictures were gone, no one was interested in pulling out their Polaroids.
    My father never owned a camera. It never occurred to him to buy one. I captured all the likenesses around our house—on our house. I realize now we should have bought a camera. We never planned for the future, for the contingency of meeting a man named George who had a fondness for white paint and a disregard for dreams. I sniffed, wiped the back of my nose with my hurt hand, and cursed at the pain.
    “Are you all right?” Thomas asked, glancing nervously at me.
    “Medication,” I lied, “It works like a sad movie on me.” I pointed to the picture. “You look like him,” I said. The man in the photograph was Thomas’s father. Thomas, too, had blonde hair. Not as long as the man in the photograph but just as sun streaked and thick. Thomas’s hair was short and spiky. He had a body that, as Freda would say, looks good in jeans. The license plate on his van was issued by the state of California. He had a smile you expected to see all over San Diego, a surfer’s smile, teeth white as foam and Hollywood straight. How did they get teeth like that, I wondered. It must be all the fresh fruit they eat.
    “What’s your last name?” I asked.
    “Mellon,” he said. It figures.
    I have always had the worst teeth. Just looking at a piece of chocolate cake could make them crumble. Dr. Willard, my dentist, said decay could find my mouth blindfolded. Thomas smiled at me. I squinted into those bright, plastic-perfect teeth. He was all of the great age of nineteen. I was married at nineteen. I’d lived a whole life since then. We had nothing in common. He was just beginning.
    Thomas was skipping college that semester. Sure, his parents were disappointed, but they understood. I didn’t. From what I could make out, Thomas was traveling as his father, the man in the picture, had: to find himself. It was an old-fashioned Sixties thing to do in a time when business schools were murdering the other disciplines. It seemed everyone in the world wanted to learn about account receivables. Except Thomas. He didn’t know what he wanted to do with his life. What do you like to do? I asked.
    “I enjoy looking at the stars,” he said.
    That led me to the obvious career choices—shepherd and astronaut. Thomas said he’d tried Space Camp when he was in high school but found the whole experience “too technical.” Now shepherd was something he hadn’t considered. “I’ll give it some thought,” he said.
    In the meantime, he planned to continue his search. He drove the same vehicle, a yellow Volkswagen van, that his father had steered more than twenty years ago. It was not keen on exploring America with another yearning, searching, stoned cowboy. It demanded new tires in Denver, a fan belt in Kansas City, a quart of oil in Ohio. It threw a fit until someone cleaned its spark plugs in Boston.
    I am familiar with the temperament of vans. T-Bone and I found my olive eyesore in a field five years ago. It was decorating some guy’s back forty. The moment I flung open the doors I knew I wanted it. The insides had been gutted. It was a great green metal shell. My footsteps echoed as I