Fiction Friday: Coverall Days

Coverall Days

By Shaylen Cornwall

Yellow is Mom’s favorite color.

When we were little, she once stayed up all night painting an entire wall of our living room yellow.

Just one wall.

When Mark and I awoke the next morning, Mom was sitting lotus style in her paint-splattered coveralls on the living room floor. Her back to us, she stared at the wall. She had gathered Mark into the cocoon of her lap and wrapped an arm around my legs. Pulling me close to her side, she kept her eyes on the wall even while she buried a kiss in Mark’s dark curls.

Later, over a bowl of oatmeal, Dad said, “It’s really something,” his eyes shining at her.

“I call it Shimmering Daylight,” Mom said, and Dad squeezed her hand across the table.

Color is Mom’s favorite color, and it’s splashed in one form or another all over our house. Some days are normal. On normal days, Mom wears a polka dot dress and heels like every other Mom on our street. She bakes cookies and does the marketing.

Then there are the coverall days.

Mark and I know the story of the coveralls, how they used to be Dad’s. We’ve heard the story at least one hundred times. Usually, we hear the story when we linger around the dinner table and they talk about that time before time, when they were young – and beautiful, they always add - and what was his or hers became theirs. We know that Dad’ll say, ‘now, I just can’t remember when she started using my old coveralls,’ they’ll laugh and smile. ‘These things happen so gradually with time,’ they’ll say, and we know that they’ll share a little smile and mouth their ‘I love yous’ when they think we’re not looking. But we know.

And we know on the coverall days that Mom’s at it again. That there will be no cookies, no hellos to the other moms, no marketing. That again, brushes will be in her hands, sticking out from between her fingers like an exoskeleton, poking out in wild angles like antennae from the knot of hair atop her head, balancing on each ear, sticking out of every pocket of her paint-splattered coveralls.

There will be brushes and canvas, paint and color. There will be glassy-eyed looks when we speak to her, and she nods and ‘mmm hhms,’ but doesn’t hear us. There will be sudden exclamations of ‘that’s it!’ and interrupted dinners when she suddenly drops her fork, pushes her chair away from the table, and is gone before Mark can feed another pea to the dog.

There will be takeout or tater tots for dinner.

There will be no way of knowing how long the coverall days will last.

How long Dad will sigh with longing and loneliness from his easy chair, his newspaper crumpled in his lap, while her studio door stays shut.

And then one evening dinner will be on the table when Dad gets home, and then we all know, Mom is back. Until the next coverall day.

Once, after Dad’s car pulled into the garage and the streetlights popped to life, and the autumn air had wrapped my breath in soft puffs of white, I peered into the kitchen window and saw them dancing. Dad’s arm around her waist, her chin tilted back, laughing as she let Dad lead her in wide circles around the kitchen. And Dad held her close even though the coveralls were splattered, and his eyes shone with joy as they took in the painty mess of her.