Mr. Szczepanski met us at the shop at seven Saturday morning in his cardigan and his reading glasses. He had cut a plain black floater frame for it on Thursday, before any of this, and he looked at the panel on the worktable for so long without saying anything that I thought he hated it. The varnish was still a little tacky. He touched the corner of the roof with his fingertip.
"Different red," he said.
"It's not red anymore."
"No." He bent close to it with his glasses pushed up. I watched him find Le Chatelier by the chimney. He didn't say anything about it. He straightened up. "Better," he said. "Not prettier. Better." And then he went to get his screws, and that was all he ever said about it, and it's possible it's the nicest thing anyone has said about anything I've made.
We drove it to the Hessler in my mother's Malibu with the back seat folded down and the panel wrapped in a moving blanket, my mother driving ten miles under the limit the whole way down Sixth Street like she was carrying eggs. Krista sat in the back with one hand on the blanket to hold it steady. I sat in the front. None of us said much. It was a gray morning, cold, with the lake the color of the new roof.
The Hessler is an old brick house with white trim and a sign on the lawn. A woman with silver earrings named Mrs. Jagoda, met us at the back door and helped us carry it in and stood it on an easel in the front room. There were the other four finalists' pieces already up, the charcoal grandfather from the Meadville boy and a ceramic thing and two paintings. Mine looked strange next to them. It looked like it had been somewhere.
Mrs. Jagoda had a clipboard. "And the title?" she said. "For the card. We have it down as Everyone Home. Is that still right?"
I looked at the picture. My mother in her window with her feet in the dishpan. Me on the landing. The empty recliner. The empty chair, upstairs, pushed back from the desk. The roof made of everything my sister knew.