Harlot Scarlet and Hellfire Red

Pushing peas around her plate, my mother talked about cancelling her mother-of-the-bride dress and losing the deposit. She met my eyes across the dinner table. A blue crept into her voice. “I wish you’d cry or yell, Caroline. Don’t hold it in.”

“I’m not,” I said. “I’m dealing with it.”

I was. From the dead black of finding my sister and my fiancé together to purple — bruised and swollen, but alive. It wasn’t where I wanted to be or to stay. And it certainly wasn’t what I wanted to paint the bedroom.

Samples covered the bed Bobby, and I shared. Chips and strips and fold-out brochures smothered the glossy wedding magazines underneath. I slept on top. It was cool, slippery like Bobby.

I saw a fresh grassy green among the paint colours. Something like it was on the walls when big sis Darla introduced us last May.

“I think Bobby’s the one for you,” she said. He wasn’t like the other guys I’d had — mild men in varying shades of beige — but I believed her. And then him.

Bobby proposed one night. The next day I decorated in orange: big Thanksgiving family dinners at our place, the sunsets we’d watch growing old together. Cute kids — two, maybe three and hopefully a girl among them — with his auburn hair. But he and she threw it all in a bonfire.

In the end, I painted the three of us on the bedroom walls. Chose one red (Harlot Scarlet) for Darla and another (Hellfire) for Bobby and poured them together. I wailed and clawed the walls until my fingernails tore, dripped hot tears and hotter blood into the pigment. Mixing well with a long knife, I rolled it on.

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