I didn't have an answer to that. Partly because it was a terrible thing for a person to believe and partly because I wasn't completely sure she was wrong.
I took the box downstairs. She came after me. And at one-thirty in the morning on Friday, October ninth, I sat on the dining room floor with my sister's chemistry flash cards and started tearing them into shingles.
It was wrong at first. It looked like a kindergarten, the way the construction paper had in August. The pink and yellow and blue were too bright against my tea-colored siding and my eleven whites of snow; it looked like somebody had put a party hat on a house at a funeral. I almost quit. I sat back on my heels at two-fifteen and looked at the first two rows along the gutter and said, out loud, "No." Krista, who was sitting at the table with her laptop open to draft twenty-seven, didn't say anything.
And then I did something I'd never done before on that picture. I broke my own rule. I went into the kitchen and put the kettle on and made a whole pot of black tea, the cheap kind my mother buys in the hundred-bag box, steeped it for twenty minutes until it was almost black, poured it into a roasting pan, and soaked the cards in it. A stack at a time. It took forever. They came out stained, all of them, the pink gone the color of old roses and the yellow gone mustard and the blue gone the gray-green of the lake in November. And the blue ink of her handwriting bled a little, softened, so that you could still read it if you got close but from three feet away it was just texture, a fine dark grain like the grain in old wood. I dried them on cookie sheets in the oven on warm, which my mother would have killed me for if she'd been awake, and I started again.
It wasn't the red roof. It was never going to be the red roof. It was a roof made of a hundred faded colors, like a quilt that's been washed too many times, darker at the peak where I put the blue-greens and lighter at the gutters where I put the old-rose pinks, so the streetlight still seemed to catch it. Up close, you could read pieces. A molar mass. An arrow pointing both ways, which Krista told me at four in the morning means a reaction that can go either direction. Le Chatelier, in block capitals, right by the chimney. I put that one face-up on purpose.
Krista didn't help tear. I didn't ask her to and she didn't offer. She sat at the table and wrote. Every so often she'd read me a sentence and ask if it sounded stupid. Most of them sounded stupid. I said so. She'd delete it and try again. Around five I heard her stop typing for a long time, and then start again, steadily, without stopping, for almost half an hour.
My mother came down at six-thirty in her bathrobe and stood in the archway and looked at us, me on the floor with tea-brown hands and Krista asleep with her face on the tablecloth next to the laptop, and the panel against the cabinet with two-thirds of a roof on it. She didn't say anything about the oven. She made coffee. At eight she woke Krista up and drove her to the walk-in crisis hours at the county mental health center on State Street, which she had found on her phone at two in the morning, and which, it turned out, saw people the same day if you said the right words, and Krista said the right words, because they were true. They were gone four hours. When they came back Krista's eyes were swollen and she had a printed sheet in a folder, and an appointment card for the next Tuesday, and she went upstairs and slept until dinner.
My mother called Mr. Paik at the paper. I heard her in the kitchen, walking back and forth, the way Krista walks.