Red.

Of course, he had wanted to paint the damn thing red last spring in an effort to recapture that “olden days” feeling of his childhood in New England. She had allowed him without much of a fight -- it wasn’t like she ever used the place enough to care what color the outside was. It had always been his place more than anything: it was where he disappeared to for hours on end fixing cars, fooling around with their engines and, as she had discovered last week, her best friend too.

Red.

She had even helped him pick out a color, just to pretend for a moment that they were close. Picking out paint, how intimate! How homey! What a perfect pantomime of domestic bliss. She had never really stopped to notice what a striking shade it was before today: red, deep red. Not like a fire engine or any blinding, awful shade of red. Deep, like crimson. Like blood.

Red.

That was what he had called her the first day they met. “Hey, Red.” He always loved her hair, naturally red and thick from an Irish grandfather. Wished she would pass it on to the girls. At night, when the girls were asleep, he would call her Red sometimes, in the deep whisper that had first lured her into the back of his Chevy when she was sixteen and he was in love with her. He loved her hair, like to run his fingers through it when they made love. Her hair was grey with age now, and he always called her by her proper name.

Red.

Angry at his treatment, she followed him one day, forming a speech in her head about how ‘those cars were more important to him than his family.’ She found him in the back room with Laurie, who she knew from the PTA. They were the same age, had the same number of kids, but Laurie dyed her hair, covered the gray ones with a rich deep red color. Like hers used to be, back when he loved her and she was more than his cook.

Red.

She ran the few feet to the old pump, heaving up and down until a stream decent enough to scrub the dishes by poured out, soaking her apron and turning it even darker than it had been. Frantic, filled with a rage at her own skin, she scrubbed viciously with the steel wool she had brought from the kitchen, scrubbing the skin away until there was nothing left to show that she had been dicing more in the kitchen than just the vegetables this evening. Her hands shook as she grated flesh away from nerves and finally, when there was no more strength left to punish herself, she dropped to her knees to watch the ground soak up the liquid that remained.

Red.