The Writing on the Wall: A Novel Read Online Free

powders packed in cartons and liquids in plastic jugs. In one box, once she tugged the padding out, was something that looked like a leaf-blower with a stubby snout. A steamer? She wasn’t sure, but it looked dangerous and cranky; she closed the box and shoved it to the side.
    There was more. A huge radio, the kind you might see at a construction site, armored in yellow rubber. A first-aid kit, with extra bandages. Yardsticks and rulers. A page torn from the local phone book with the names and numbers of contractors to call in case she needed help.
    In a separate, neater pile, stacked on end like the pipes of an organ, were the rolls of wallpaper Jeannie had ordered online. There seemed to be a huge number of these—she wondered if Tom had made a mistake in his calculations. The wrapping made it hard to see what was inside, but the exposed edges revealed that it was indeed the soft peach color Jeannie had described.
    She decided to start by stripping the foyer—the smallest room in the house. Finish there and she would have a minor victory to build on. After that she could tackle the front parlor, the room with the most sun, come out again to do the hall, zigzag to the sewing room and back parlor, then finish with the dining room.
    No reason to delay. She went around opening the windows first, or at least trying to, their sashes were so old and swollen. The radio she propped up on the remains of the fireplace, fiddling with the dial until she came upon a station from Canada playing French music—easy listening, since she didn’t understand a word. From the supply pile she selected a five-inch-wide putty knife, deciding she would start with the simplest tool and see how far she got with that.
    A good part of the foyer was taken up by the front door. To its left, the wall was only one strip wide—a perfect place to start. The putty knife, with its fat grip, felt awkward in her hand, and she kept twisting it around trying to find the right balance. Dan was the artist with tools; she had always been helpless with them, and even the simple labs she did with her eighth-graders offered her all kinds of opportunities to mess up.
    Did the wallpaper sense that? Did it know her weakness? In school, she made up for her clumsiness with humor, but the wallpaper would not be charmed by smiles or corny jokes.
    It was the knotty pine paper—it looked as thick and unpeelable as wood—but there was a weak spot where the strip met the door frame and overlapped like a loose flap of skin. The one tip Dan had given her was to always start at the top near the ceiling and work down, so gravity helped with the peeling and the strips fell to the floor of their own weight. She reached—the edge was just wide enough she could get her fingers around it. As a girl, shopping with her mother, the butcher would lean over the counter and hand her a slice of bologna as a treat, and she would go off by herself to the produce section and carefully peel off the rind. Pulling the first strip of paper was like that, easy and satisfying, though it was disappointing that only the overlapped edge came off, not the paper that was glued.
    She went to fetch the stepladder, picked a spot where the wall met the ceiling in a shallow crevice. The putty knife was sharp— she held it edgewise and sawed until there was a spot where the blade could gain purchase and lift. She did this gently, but at an angle that was far too acute, so the blade dug into the plaster. The trick seemed to be holding it at a flatter angle to the wall, more like a spatula than a knife. By doing so, she was able to get under the edge and pry, but, after a second’s worth of tension, only a nickel-sized piece of paper broke away. She watched it flutter down past the ladder to the floor, feeling both triumph and despair.
    The good news was that the sliver of paper, in dropping, had created a slightly larger edge, a slightly larger vulnerability. She flattened the scraper to the plaster, twisted