The first thing I saw was the roof.
It was on the dining room floor, which was wrong, because the roof was supposed to be four feet off the floor, at the top of a sheet of birch plywood leaning against the china cabinet, where it had been leaning for seven weeks. Now it was in pieces on the linoleum, hundreds of little dark red pieces, some of them still stuck together in clumps, some of them floating in a spreading gray puddle that smelled like my rinse bucket. The rinse bucket itself was on its side under the table. The panel was face-down. One corner of it had split where it hit the radiator, and a long splinter of pale wood stuck up from the break like a bone.
I was still holding my keys. I remember that because I remember the key to Mr. Szczepanski's back door biting into my palm, the little brass one with the green nail polish on it so I could find it in the dark, and I remember thinking, very calmly, that I should put the keys down before I dropped them in the water. I didn't put them down. I stood in the doorway between the kitchen and the dining room in my work apron, which still had a smear of gold leaf size on the bib from the frame I'd been gilding, and I looked at my picture on the floor.
Then I looked up, because somebody was sitting on the stairs.
Our house on West Twenty-Third Street in Erie is the kind where the stairs come straight down into the dining room, with a little half-wall and a spindle railing that my mother painted white the year my father left and that has been chipping ever since. My sister Krista was sitting on the fourth step from the bottom with her arms around her knees. She had her Northlake State sweatshirt on, the crimson one with the white lighthouse, and her hair was up in the claw clip, and her hands were wet. I could see the wet on them from across the room. There was gray water to her wrists and something white and gummy caught under her fingernails, and there was a putty knife on the step beside her. My putty knife. The one with the blue handle I used to burnish the edges down.
"What did you do," I said. It didn't come out like a question. It came out flat, like I was reading it off a sign.
Krista looked at me. She had our mother's eyes, gray and wide-set, and when we were little people used to say she looked like a doll, which she hated. She did not look like a doll right then. She looked like someone who had been running and had just stopped.
"Maybe now," she said, "everyone stops talking about your stupid art."