CONTESTABLE -- Chapter One: The Good Pen

Danny Kessler woke at 4:10 in the morning to the smell of paint, and lay there for a while hoping it was a dream.

It was not. Dreams didn't come with the soft shhk, shhk of a roller somewhere below him, or his wife singing Patsy Cline at a volume she clearly believed was a whisper.

He reached across the bed. Her side was cold. Not cooling -- cold. She hadn't been in it at all.

Third night.

He counted it the way he'd learned to count it, over twenty-six years: not in hours, but in nights. One night up was a woman with a lot on her mind. Two nights was a warning. Three nights was weather, and you didn't argue with weather. You found out which way it was moving and you got the kids indoors.

Except the kids were mostly grown, and only Lucy was left in the house, and Lucy was eighteen and slept like a dropped coat. So it was just Danny, forty-seven, in a T-shirt from a defunct plumbing supply company, padding down the stairs toward the smell.

The kitchen was yellow.

Not buttercream or wheat or any of the cowardly names on the paint chips at Lowe's. It was the yellow of a school bus that had been told good news. It was on the walls, the trim, two of the cabinet doors, and roughly a third of the ceiling, where Maren stood on the top step of the ladder -- the step with the sticker that said THIS IS NOT A STEP -- with the roller extended above her head like a torch.

"Don't say anything," she said, without turning around. "You'll ruin the second coat."

"I haven't said anything."

"You're saying it with your feet. Your feet have opinions." She leaned out further than anybody should lean on a ladder and Danny's whole body went tight. "Do you know what color this is?"

"Yellow."

"It's called Tuesday Morning. I mixed it myself. I bought three gallons of a yellow that was too sad and one quart of a yellow that was too loud and I had them shake hands." She finally looked down at him. Her eyes were very bright. Her hair was up in one of his bandanas, and there was a stripe of Tuesday Morning across her cheekbone like war paint. She was forty-six and in this light she looked about thirty, and also about to fly apart. "It's a happy kitchen now. We've been living in a beige kitchen like a couple of tax attorneys."

"Mare. Come down off the ladder."

"In a minute."

"It's four in the morning."

"Which is exactly when the light is right. You can't paint a ceiling at noon, Danny, the sun gets involved." The tray tilted, and a slow tongue of yellow slid over its edge onto the drop cloth -- which, to her credit, she'd put down. Even at her highest, some part of Maren always put down the drop cloth, and he had never known whether to find that comforting or heartbreaking.

He went to the counter by the coffee maker, where the pill organizer lived.

It was a long plastic thing with a lid for every day of the week, in rainbow colors, because the plain one had made her feel, she said, "like a ward of the state." He flipped up the lids. Sunday, empty. Monday, empty. Tuesday -- the real Tuesday, two days ago -- full. Wednesday, full. Thursday, full.

He stood there holding the lid and didn't say anything, and she felt him not saying it from the top of the ladder.

"I took them Sunday," she said.

"I know you did."

"And Monday."

"I know."

"And then I stopped feeling like a screensaver, and I thought I'd just have a couple of days of being a person. A couple of days. Is that so terrible?" The roller went shhk, shhk. "Everybody else gets to be a person every day of the week. I get a punch card."

He closed the lid. He'd had this conversation in hospital parking lots and once, memorably, at a Cracker Barrel in Tennessee. He knew all her lines and she knew all of his, and the trouble was that her lines were better. That was half the reason he'd married her.

"Dr. Anand says the lithium needs to be steady," he said, "or it doesn't --"

"Dr. Anand has never mixed a yellow in his life."

"Mare."

She sighed, the sigh of a woman terribly put-upon by a man in a plumbing shirt, and came down the ladder -- carefully, which he noticed -- and walked straight into him and put her forehead against his chest, paint and all, and they stood like that in the yellow kitchen for a while.

"I'll take Thursday," she said into his shirt. "Tonight. I promise. I'll take Thursday tonight and I'll go to bed like a good Catholic girl."

"You're not Catholic."

"I'll go to bed like a lapsed Methodist. It's very similar. There's less kneeling." She tipped her head back to look at him. "Today's the day, right? The insurance man."

"Ten o'clock."

"Then I have to finish the ceiling." She was already back at the ladder, lit up again like somebody had found her switch. "The insurance man can't see a half-yellow ceiling. He'll think we're unstable."

Danny opened his mouth and closed it again, and went to make coffee in the happiest kitchen in Coconino County.

---

Lucy came down at 7:15 in a hoodie the size of a camping tent, took one look at the kitchen, and said, "Oh, no."

"It's called Tuesday Morning," Danny said.

"It's Thursday."

"Your mother is aware."

Maren was on the back porch now, rinsing rollers with the garden hose and singing "Walkin' After Midnight" to the neighbor's dog, who was enjoying it. Lucy watched her through the window with the flat, unreadable expression Danny privately thought of as the weather report. She'd grown up watching her brother and sister read their mother's moods like a barometer, and somewhere along the way she'd decided not to show anything on her own face at all.

"How many nights?" she asked.

"Three."

Lucy got her phone out and started typing with both thumbs.

Danny knew where that was going. His three children had a group text, and it was called -- Maren had named it, of course -- KESSLER WEATHER SERVICE. He wasn't on it. He wasn't supposed to know what was on it. He knew anyway, because Jessie, his oldest, had left her phone face-up on the counter at Easter, and he'd seen the most recent message before he could stop himself. It was from Owen. It said: forecast: partly manic with a chance of new hobby.

He'd laughed out loud, and then had to go stand in the garage for a while.

"Don't make it a big thing," he said now.

"I'm making it a medium thing." Lucy sent the text. Somewhere in Phoenix, a phone buzzed on a nurse's station. Somewhere in Tucson, a phone buzzed under a pillow. "Jess is gonna call you from work." She grabbed a granola bar and looked at him -- really looked at him, the weather report flickering for just a second. "You look like garbage, Dad."

"Thank you, sweetheart."

"I mean it. You're gray."

"I've been up since four watching your mother paint the ceiling."

"You never look tired. You run six miles in the snow." She shrugged into her backpack. "Eat something."

And she was out the door before he could answer, which was how Lucy liked to win arguments: by leaving them.

The TV on the counter was running the morning news with the sound low, and when it went to commercial, a cartoon man in a bathrobe clutched his chest while an animated red fist squeezed his stomach. Fast relief for the burn that won't quit!

Huh, Danny thought.

There'd been a fist sitting under his breastbone, on and off, since about Sunday. He hadn't put it into words until right now, watching the cartoon man. It wasn't much. It showed up on the last hill of his run and sometimes after dinner, and it tasted a little like the chili from Sunday, so he figured that's what it was. He was forty-seven. Apparently that's when chili started hanging around for a week.

The cartoon man smiled and the fist went away. Danny didn't take anything. He never took anything. He rinsed his mug and went to find his keys.