The red came from the recycling, like I said. I found it in the middle of August, on a Tuesday night, about a week after I'd started the panel and was still trying to figure out what the roof would be. I'd tried brick-colored construction paper and it looked like a kindergarten. I'd tried the red pages from a Target ad and they were too orange and too shiny, like a roof made of ketchup. I needed something dark, with weight to it. Something with a little tooth.
And there it was, in the bin, under a flattened Cheerios box and a pile of pizza coupons: a bunch of torn-up envelopes and letters from Northlake State. Big ones, nine-by-twelve, and regular business-size ones, all with the university's crimson band across the top and the white lighthouse logo. The paper was gorgeous. That's what I noticed. Heavy, soft, twenty-four-pound cotton bond, the kind Mr. Szczepanski uses for certificates, with a laid texture you could see when you held it up to the garage light, little parallel lines in it like a field after plowing. And the crimson band was printed so deep and so even that when I tore it, the color went all the way down into the fibers and the torn edge came out a darker red, almost purple, furry, like the edge of a scab.
I sat on the garage floor and tore one test piece and held it up and I actually said, out loud, "Oh, come on." Because it was perfect. It was the exact roof.
They were addressed to Krista. Of course they were. Northlake sent her things all the time, or I thought they did; it's a state school and they send everybody things. Parking permits and alumni magazines and surveys and invitations to things. And they'd already been torn in half, some of them in quarters, the way Krista tears up junk mail, which is very thoroughly, because she listened to some podcast about identity theft when she was fifteen and has torn every piece of paper with her name on it into confetti ever since. I didn't read them. I want to say that clearly, because later I asked myself a thousand times whether I did and I didn't. I looked at them the way I looked at everything that fall, for color and weight and tooth. I saw that there were words on them the way you see that there are bricks in a wall. That's all.
I took the whole stack. Over the next six weeks I went back to the bin every Tuesday and there were more, usually one or two, once five, and I took those too, and I didn't think about why a university would send someone so much mail, or why the envelopes were so thick, or why some of them had the green-and-white certified sticker on the front. I sorted them into REDS. I tore them into shingles, each one about the size of a stamp, and I glued them down mostly face-down or with the printed side tucked under the next row, because I didn't want the words showing. I wanted it to be a roof. But paper is paper and it has two sides and when you're on your fortieth hour on a roof, at one in the morning, you don't check every single shingle. Some of them went down face-up. I knew that. I liked it, even. When you got up close you could see a little white type here and there in the red, like the ghost of an old sign painted on a brick wall. I thought it gave it history.
Krista saw the roof for the first time on a Saturday in September. She came down the stairs into the dining room and stopped on the bottom step and looked at it for a long time.
"Where'd you get that paper," she said.
"Recycling," I said. "It's your Northlake junk. Is that okay? You were throwing it out."
She didn't say anything for a second. Then she said, "It's fine," and went into the kitchen and I heard the back door. I didn't think about that either. I want to be honest about how little I thought about anything that wasn't the picture.