It all started, as so many things used to, with a letter in the mail.
Clarence Merriweather plucked the postcard out of the mailbox. In a soft looping cursive that reminded him of Marilyn Monroe, the postcard read:
Dear Clar Merriweather,
CONGRATULATIONS! You have been chosen to represent the state of Nebraska in the country’s newest and biggest competition: The American Crafts Fair. Our judges have carefully chosen one representative from each state. The event will take place in Portland, Oregon on July 1st. The winner will take home a $10,000 cash prize. Should you choose to accept this honor, the participation fee is $99.99, to be sent to the P.O. box below. God bless and good luck,
C. Prestwood, Founder and Director
He reread it again, eyes lingering on “Clar.”
He flipped the postcard over. A rippling American flag covered the front, topped with royal blue block letters that read ACF!
He tossed the postcard on the kitchen table and sank into his chair. Two sunny-side up eggs and a strip of bacon grimaced up at him.
“Check it out, honey.”
“Hmm?” Candy stooped over the kitchen sink, scratching at the hardened ring of grime that gripped the inside of the coffee pot with the tip of a butter knife.
“Looks like my little dashboard hoo-daddies got someone’s attention.”
He pressed his finger to the postcard and took a bite of bacon. Candy made better eggs, but Clarence made crispier bacon. He liked to silently draw attention to this by wiggling a rubbery piece of bacon in front of his face, just briefly, before softly biting into it.
“What’s that?”
“I got a postcard.” He slid it to the edge of the table and held it up.
Candy tossed the pot in the sink with a sharp squeeze of dish soap and filled it to the brim with scalding water. She wiped her hands on her apron and turned.
“A postcard? From who?”
She snatched the card from his hand and scanned it quickly. Then she read it again, slower.
“It says it’s to Clar,” she said, finally.
In McCook, the sons of poor farmers—of which Clarence was one—were given castrated nicknames in middle school. Clarence’s classmates had deemed his curly blond hair decidedly girlish, their chiding as brutish and instinctive as the swarms of locusts that devoured Clare’s father’s crops every July. The nickname followed him from childhood, undermining his reputation like a phallic-shaped mole on his neck or worse, a gay uncle.
“It’s a typo, so what?” Clare pressed the side of his fork into his egg, bursting the yolk.
“So how do you know it’s for you?”
Clare paused, then forked a hemisphere of fried egg into his mouth and laughed. He had been married to his wife Claire—who went by Candy—long enough to have grown a funny bone for what was his and what wasn’t.
“Candy, honey, it’s not for you,” he shook his head. Candy leaned against the counter, arms crossed.
The two had met after high school, at the low-income dental clinic where Candy worked as a receptionist. Once they were engaged, she had decided to go by Candy, even though her mother had pointed out that it was a stripper name.
“My legal name is Claire, yours is Clarence,” Candy said. “It’s only two letters off from mine, and four letters off from yours.”
“Look, honey,” Clare pushed himself away from the table and scooped up his plate. “Remember how I taught Harper’s Girl Scout troop how to make my Dashboard Diddies at the scout roundup out in Omaha that summer? And how Channel 4 was there?”
He slid his plate into the sink, next to the coffee pot. “It’s one thing to make dashboard figurines of the rich and famous out of plastic and paint. Anyone from China to Taiwan can do that. But to make ’em out of the nuts and bolts of a car is another thing entire.” He glanced at the Diddy collecting dust on the kitchen windowsill, one of the first he’d ever made as a gift for his wife: a bolt and nut impersonation of Julia Roberts cobbled together from 1969 Mustang parts, complete with two tiny, swooping strips of tire rubber for hair and oversized googly-eyes that had made Candy laugh-scream.
Candy grabbed the broom from the corner of the kitchen and began sweeping in quick, rough strokes.
“That was ten years ago, Clare. And what about my Flapper Funhouses, hmm?” She swept around his boots. “Remember who presented the first and only luxury birdhouse design at the Red Willow County Fair, and who nearly won first place?”
She swept around Peanut, their aging English bulldog lying beached beneath the table, his stunted snout and sagging jowls true dissenters against the march of evolution. Peanut liked snoring on the couch next to Candy in the mornings while she read, but preferred to rest his head on Clare’s lap when he watched baseball in the living room at night.
Candy shoved the broom back into the corner and untied her apron. “I still get emails from people all the way in Kansas asking for pointers on how to get the angle of them little birdy slides just right. And I’m sure that first-place floozy was sleepin’ with the judge anyhow.”
Clare stood with his thumbs hooked into the front of his jeans, sucking his teeth and staring at his wife with something like hardened amusement in his eyes.
“Guess we’ll just need to call ’em and find out who it’s for, huh?” He nodded his chin toward the sink. “You oughta run that coffee pot through with some vinegar. Probably need to do it twice to get that gunk out.” He turned and ambled toward the living room. Peanut labored to his feet and waddled after him.
“That’s alright, I’ll leave that to you.” Candy pulled off her apron and tossed it over the back of a chair. She started toward the bedroom, leaning into the living room as she passed.
“And you can take care of that breakfast dish of yours too, while you’re at it.”
◆
Candy sat on the edge of the bed, phone pressed to her ear, notepad on her lap.
“I don’t know, Mom,” Harper said. “I’m looking at the website and it looks really, like, amateur.”
“Well, it’s a brand new event,” Candy shrugged. “I’m sure it’ll take them a while to get it up and running. Did I tell you it’s a $10,000 cash prize?”
Harper was a junior at Whittier College, just outside Orange County. She had seemed to sever her conservative Midwestern roots the second she stepped foot on campus, declaring a major in printmaking—whatever that was—and dying her hair pink. When Candy saw her daughter at Christmas the previous year, Harper had a small tattoo on the back of her neck that made Candy shriek. Her daughter insisted the tattoo was inspired by her: flying birds in the shape of an infinity symbol. Candy had made the sign of the cross and groaned, “Next time you wanna pay me tribute, read my favorite Bible verse.”
“You also said they’re charging you to participate.” Harper was treading lightly, Candy could tell. “How much is it again?”
Candy didn’t answer. When her daughter turned six, she had wanted a double-decker Barbie Dreamhouse for her birthday. But Dreamhouses were expensive, and Candy knew she could make something better herself, something with good bones that could take the abuse from a pack of sugar-loaded six-year-olds. It’s true Candy’s attempt bore more of a resemblance to a double-decker birdhouse—complete with a curving tinfoil-reinforced cardboard slide that ran from the second story down and out the little back door—than a Barbie Dreamhouse. But if the gaggle of kindergarteners noticed a difference, they didn’t let on. Though Candy thought she detected a small moment of hesitation passing over her daughter’s face—was it surprise, or disappointment?—before she looked up from her gift and beamed.
“It just seems like a phishing scheme,” Harper murmured.
Candy shook her head once, squeezed her eyes shut.
“My lord, Harper, no one’s going fishing. This is a craft fair. Anyway, we won’t be sending any money until we figure out which one of us is going. I just think it’s a great opportunity for me. Or for your father, I suppose.”
“That’s great, Mom,” Harper’s voice softened. “Congrats. So if you win, will you share any of your cash with dad? Or is this basically going to be another Peanut situation?”
Candy snorted. “I’m the dog’s favorite, you know that. But no, when I win, I’ll be sure to give him a little something to ease the sting.”
After they hung up, Candy dialed the number her daughter had given her from the website. It went straight to a recorded message.
“You’ve reached the American Crafts Fair,” a man’s voice said. “For payment options or to submit your admission fee, press one. To leave a message, press two.”
Candy pressed two.
“Hi, this is Claire Merriweather, the representative that was picked for Nebraska—which I am so excited about, believe me. I’m just calling because the postcard I received says that it’s for Clar, like C-L-A-R, and my husband has this funny idea that the invitation is actually for him—even though his name is Clarence. Anyhoo, just wanted to give ya’ll a call to confirm that the invitation is for me, Claire, with the birdhouses. I’ll try calling again tomorrow. Thanks a million!”
Candy hung up and pounded downstairs to the living room, crossing in front of Clare’s baseball game to the antique writer’s desk in the corner where her equally ancient typewriter sat. Her mother had gotten it from the thrift store during one of her many post-happy-hour shopping sprees, but it was by far the best thing she’d ever brought Candy.
Clare looked over his shoulder.
“Doin’ some writing?”
After her mother brought the typewriter home, seven-year-old Candy set it out on their back deck and typed her name, then her mother’s name, then the name of her stillborn sister. She thought if she could type her dead sister’s name fast enough, it would make her mother’s belly swell again with the promise of laughter and soft knit blankets and Sunday morning pancakes, her mother sober and attentive and bursting with warmth and light. Candy did not type the name of her father, who divorced her mother after the last miscarriage and was living with a much younger woman in Reno.
As she grew older, she began to write stories, her small fingers pressing the keys methodically as she squinted into the heat rising from the dirt of her backyard. She filled pages with the adventures of birds as they flew south: stories of robins sunning themselves on beaches, pushing their beaks into the skin of oranges to suck out fresh juice. Her mother loved her stories, coaxing Candy to read them to her friends as they lounged in the living room, smoke circling their heads and martinis sweating in their hands.
“She’s going to be a famous writer one day, you’ll see,” her mother had beamed, tipping her cocktail toward her daughter. “Watch for her name in Harper’s Magazine.”
Candy yanked the pen drawer open and pulled out a checkbook. Stooping, she scribbled out the check, ripped it from the book and shoved it in her back pocket.
“Just payin’ the bills to keep this roof over our head,” she mumbled. She rummaged around the drawer, fingers closing over an envelope. “Anyway, that old typewriter’s about as useless as gum on a boot heel.”
Candy looked through the glass door at the shed, her makeshift artist studio for the birdhouses. The cottonwood grove glittered behind it, leaves reflecting the late spring sun. Nestled inside the grove was a shallow dirt pit that used to house water in the summers, the perfect baby pool for teaching Harper how to hold her breath underwater and float, despite the bugs and muck and clumps of cattails. One summer, it had rained so much that little egrets waded around like it was a Florida beach, snatching up moths and mosquito hawks. Hardly anything grew there now, in the space that once held magic for her and her daughter.
Candy blinked. She yanked open the sliding glass door and stepped out into the yard.
Clare looked over his shoulder, eyebrows raised.
“Suit yourself,” he mumbled.
◆
Clare watched his wife cross the lawn to the shed, arms swinging stiffly by her sides. In that determined stride he saw her storming the softball field nearly a decade ago, 10-year-old-Harper wide-eyed and sprawled across home plate, the echo of the umpire’s call still haunting the field—SHE’S OUT—and the stone-faced umpire gathering up his height in the face of Candy’s charge until she was inches from his face, smiling through gritted teeth. I’m a lady, so I don’t talk like this, she had simmered, but you gotta be fuckin’ kidding me.
Clare turned off the television. He heard hammering in the distance, then an electric drill. During her second trimester with Harper, a similar wildness had overtaken Candy. She took to writing every night after work, perched in front of her typewriter in the corner of the living room, arms curved around the beach ball growing in her lap. Clare wasn’t allowed to read his wife’s drafts, but he did it anyway whenever she disappeared on the phone or went out back to feed the birds. She was working on a story of a young widow traveling with a wagon train headed west. The woman had nothing to her name and no living relations, was faced with the overwhelming and fantastic prospect of starting over, of being given a second chance at carving out a place for herself in the world.
The morning she and Clare came home from the hospital—Candy nursing Harper in the living room, the morning sun backlighting the loose pieces of hair that frizzed out from her bun like a halo—Clare asked his wife what would happen to the woman in her story.
Candy didn’t lift her eyes from their daughter’s tiny head. “Oh, I imagine she’ll die of tuberculosis before they reach Oregon,” she’d said.
Clare rose to his feet, Peanut’s wrinkled face sloughing sideways off his lap. He lumbered to the garage.
It wasn’t until Clare’s sophomore year in high school that his nickname begat obvious irony. His shoulders had broadened like goal posts over the summer, pinning unfortunate freshmen against the halls as he hulked past. The garage door grumbled open and sunlight swelled in, ran over junked car shells and blown-out tires, rusted axles and bundles of wires before it illuminated the rows of Dashboard Diddies lined up across the back of Clare’s workbench. Poor farmers’ sons became high school football gods, then went to work as mechanics. Some learned to transmute the source of their childhood shame into emblems of pride: In his case, the name Clare was embroidered in looping red cursive on the breast pocket of his XXL mineral blue mechanic’s uniform.
On the left side of the workbench was Elvis, his lug nut head adorned with a dramatic swoop of tire rubber. Clare bopped Elvis with a forefinger, its tiny pelvis rocking side to side. He tapped as many of the Dashboard Diddies as fast as he could, moving from Frank Sinatra to Billie Holiday to Louis Armstrong. He sat down on his old weathered stool and watched them sway. The stool had belonged to his father, a failed farmer but skilled hobbyist who was, in Clare’s opinion, the best car mechanic in McCook. His father had built a detached garage a football field’s length away from the house. Whenever Clare’s mother left to visit her sister in Des Moines for the week, he wheeled in a fixer-upper, and he and Clare went to town on it.
“Why don’t you tell mom about the cars?” Clare had once asked his father’s outstretched legs, the rest of him swallowed beneath a dismembered Camaro.
“Always keep one secret in a marriage, son,” his father had replied, words muffled beneath the car’s belly. “The second a woman thinks she knows everything about you, the second she ain’t interested anymore.”
Clare watched his creations slow to a stop, Buddy Holly still swaying slightly.
What Candy had said was true: her birdhouses made waves at the county fair and on craft blogs from Omaha to Sioux City. His Diddies were born of a cheap attempt to impress Harper’s fourth-grade Girl Scout troop—which had worked—but they didn’t hold a flame to his wife’s two-story bird condos.
They had visited Harper’s college campus between her freshman and sophomore years, had toured the stately art buildings and echoing painting and printmaking rooms. Harper spoke a different language as she guided them, tossing off the names of French and Japanese artists. When Harper showed them her most recent lithograph, a word Clare repeated to himself over and over in his head so he wouldn’t forget, Candy’s eyes had misted up. It was hanging in the front of the classroom, hand chosen by her professor to set an example for the other students.
“It’s not that big of a deal, Mom,” Harper had said, blushing with pleasure.
The sound of sawing hummed like a cicada from the backyard. Clare stood up from his stool and reached into his truck bed. He hauled out two plastic bags, the ends of paintbrushes elbowing the thin sides. He’d had to drive all the way to Kearney to find a Hobby Lobby, telling his wife he was looking at a man’s 1966 Ford Mustang, his next fixer-upper project. He set the bags on his work bench and pulled out a blank 8×8 canvas, a small table easel, three brushes, and a starter set of acrylic paints. He sank into his stool and reached down, scratching Peanut under his chin rolls.
“You know your mom. She won’t compete if I don’t.” He unscrewed the top of the blue paint. “Let’s give her a run for her money.”
◆
Candy left three more messages on the contest line. She also called the bank twice to make sure the check for her submission had been cashed. It had.
Every night after supper, she disappeared into the backyard. Meanwhile Clare and Peanut took up residency in the garage, their goings on frustratingly quiet every time Candy went inside for water and stopped to press her ear against the door to the garage, holding her breath. One evening, Candy burst into the house with a busted thumb, blood blister blackening beneath her nail. She opened the freezer to grab an ice pack and paused, looked over her shoulder, then pulled out the bottle of tequila they kept in the freezer for special occasions. It was nearly full, perpetually in wait for some deserving event. She tucked it under her arm and headed back out to the shed.
Weeks fell away like dead skin cells. Laundry piled up and dishes sat in the sink, caked with the remains of TV dinners turned upside down onto dinner plates. When Candy and Clare sat down to eat, they talked about anything but their submissions. They talked about work and the neighbor’s barking dog, about plane ticket prices and their packing list for Portland, about Harper’s new boyfriend, another pale, spaghetti-armed guitarist they hoped she’d outgrow soon.
Candy’s hands grew rougher and shoulders grew thinner, her eyes looking bigger and wilder in their sockets. Clare grew quiet and ponderous, asking his wife at dinner whether she thought their orange dish towel was more of an apricot or a melon hue.
“Pumpkin,” she said, chewing roughly with one side of her mouth, looking straight ahead. Clare cocked his head and looked at the towel thoughtfully.
◆
The day before the submission deadline was blisteringly hot, the twilight holding onto the heat and humidity like a grudge. Candy set the water glass down in the sink, exhaling hard. After a few beats of silence, she bent low and grabbed the liter of Tito’s she’d stashed beneath the sink. She was almost out the door when the blinking red light of the answering machine yanked her back in.
“Hey Mom or Dad, call me back as soon as you can.” It was Harper. Her voice was hurried like she was walking quickly, maybe pacing.
“I was just talking to my roommate’s girlfriend Stacy, and her parents live out in Kearney, and she said her parents got the same postcards that you guys did, the one about the contest. Did Mom ever get ahold of anyone? I’m just worried that maybe—”
Candy pressed delete.
She stepped out into the humid night. New leaves tittered on fresh stems. Stars bobbed overhead. To the east, the warm glow of Omaha swelled on the horizon. She stopped and squinted at the stars. Some were wrapped in a muted light, their toil too many lightyears away to be appreciated. Other closer, bigger stars shined sharp and naked, imbued with the confidence of planets. Maybe they were planets, Candy thought, squinting one eye then the other. She couldn’t remember how to tell the difference. But it didn’t really matter, did it? Planet or not, you could get mistaken for one if you shined bright enough.
◆
“Alright, Harper. Thanks for calling. I’ll talk to her.”
Clare hung up the phone. He exhaled deeply through his nose, rubbed the underside of his jaw with a meaty palm. Peanut peered up at him from the kitchen floor, bloodshot eyes fixed on Clare’s.
“Alright,” he said to the dog.
In the garage, he pulled out the cardboard box tucked beneath his workbench and popped open the lid. He riffled through the canvases inside, thumbing through his rolodex of crude portraits—an apple tree, a truck, a robin’s nest, another truck—the last one a feeble conjuring of his father’s old yellow Ford. Some of the canvases stuck together, still gummy. He settled on his favorite: a cockeyed painting of Peanut’s face, drooping features rendered in all different shades of blue.
The shed was empty. Clare called for his wife, hand cupped to his mouth. He spotted a thin trail snaking through the prairie grass, leading to the cottonwood grove at the edge of their property. “Candy?” He called again as he neared the trees. There was an eerie flash of color in the heart of the grove, a spectral glimmer in the dried-up pond bed where Candy and Harper used to love picking up mosquito bites. “That you?” He rounded two thick conjoined trunks, the nook where he used to sit to watch his wife and daughter, and stopped short. The painting slipped out from beneath his arm.
“Sweet Jesus,” he whispered.
In the darkness loomed a house, a thin, gangly structure seemingly sprouted from the dirt. It stood askew, not the size of a real home but that of an oversized playhouse, the slanted chute-like interior so narrow Clare doubted he could move through it without his shoulders getting pinned. A handful of unfinished windows poxed the perimeter at uneven heights, each window girded by window boxes sporting fresh daisies in pungent soil, their petaled heads tilted toward the ground as though in slumber. Most stunningly, the entire house was painted an obscene shade of pink that even the darkness couldn’t tame. Clare couldn’t shake the idea of a massive stick of gum pressed into the earth by God himself. He blinked, recognizing the color. Barbie Dreamhouse pink.
Clare scooped up the painting and approached the house, mouth agape, gaze climbing to the round hole carved into the second story, a hole for birds converted into an oeil-de-boeuf. There, at last, was his wife.
Candy’s face was red, skin beneath her eyes puffy. She peered blearily down at Clare, mouth set grimly.
“I didn’t finish mine,” she said.
“Candy,” he croaked, shaking his head. “Honey, this is…”
“A Wash Up’s Magnum Opus. That’s the title, I think,” she hiccupped, wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.
“No, Candy, it’s—”
“Would be hard to get it all the way to Portland,” she laughed joylessly.
Clare was still shaking his head, felt he couldn’t stop until he clamped one hand to the side of his head to still it, which he did.
“It’s incredible,” he breathed. “I mean this is, you are…” He faltered. Gingerly, he pulled the painting out from under his arm and held the canvas above his head.
“You win, honey,” he boomed. “This is the best I got.”
Candy squinted down at the canvas. The gauzy layer of clouds overhead unraveled, just enough for the moon to spotlight the primitive portrait of their dog’s face. Candy’s eyes traced the misshapen navy blue nose and drooping cerulean jowls, the lopsided light-blue ears and roll of turquoise forehead skin protruding like a rooster’s comb. And beneath it all was Clare’s impish grin.
Candy looked from the canvas to her husband and swayed. She put a hand to her mouth, the understanding of what her husband had done warming her like another shot. Despite its rough-hewn execution, she could see something miraculous in the painting, something visionary and triumphant. Somehow, in the dog’s gaze, Clare had captured a sparkle of likeness to their Peanut, a dazzling metaphrasing of their pet’s ineffable spirit. Candy closed her eyes and invited the inverted image of the dog’s face to shimmer there, all the shades of blue transmuted into brilliant yellows, dandelion and lemon, butter and canary, gathering and bursting in a spectacular kaleidoscope, suspended in the endless black expanse behind her eyes.