“It’s a dumb idea,” I said, sniffing. “Stranger’s house.”
“I’ll sit right here,” he said. “I won’t move, I promise.”
“Oldest trick in the book,” I said. “Lightbulb changing.”
“It is true, though,” he said.
I sipped my tea. “Nah.”
Still, I felt a strange and powerful pull to his second floor.
“I’ll come by in the daytime with a friend,” I said, “and we’ll change every lightbulb you need.”
“Sure, of course,” he said, shrugging. “Thank you.”
He refilled his cup with hot water. From our spot in the kitchen, I could make out the side frames of paintings lining the stairway walls, chosen carefully over time to represent whatever he wanted to observe while ascending. He stirred his tea.
“Okay, fine,” I said, standing. “Twist my arm.”
He raised his eyebrows, surprised.
“I might steal something, you know,” I said.
“Go ahead,” he said, warmly. “Take whatever you like. It’s the first room on your left. Thank you, thank you so much.”
I left my mug and climbed the stairs, past paintings of green hills dotted with trees and sheep, painted by a person named Hovick. The old man sat at the table downstairs, sipping his tea. I could hear him, sipping loudly, nearly slurping, and he had been a polite and quiet sipper earlier, so I figured he was doing it to let me know he was staying put.
“Where’s the bulb?” I asked, at the top of the stairs.
“On the dresser,” he called.
The room was cheerful enough—a small bedroom with a twin bed, a vase holding a graceful twig that required no water, and a lush, light-green carpet that matched the kitchen tiles. A desk lamp glowed through a sheer, paisley-patterned shade. On the dresser was the new fluorescent bulb with its squiggly spiral up, and I turned off the overhead light, stood on a wooden chair, and unscrewed the fixture. The bulb was warm. With a bit of balancing, I reached up with the new bulb and screwed it in, and on with the fixture again, and a twist and a turn, and his loud sipping below reminding me I had nothing to fear. I pushed the chair back to the desk and surveyed the room once again, my gaze settling on the bedside table, where a book about Ohio flora lay next to a fluted lamp. “Done,” I called.
“Thank you,” he said, from the kitchen.
But I did not feel done. I picked up the book on Ohio flora. Inside, between pictures of dogwood trees, I found pressed petals, wrinkled and overlapping and folded, page after page. He had saved a whole bouquet. I punched the bed’s pillow in the center, to make it look as if a person had slept on it at some point. It was a headless pillow, a pillow that had not made contact with a head, a sight that made me feel inexplicably angry. I moved the twig to the other side of the vase. I looked under the bed and saw two slippers lined up neatly, the kind with a band over the toes made of floral terrycloth. I shook and emptied the book of Ohio flora petals all over the bed, until it was covered in dry purple flowers, like a honeymoon bed for one.
Downstairs, the man was staring out the window.
I settled into my seat.
“Thank you,” he said again. “I’ve heard so much talk about these fluorescent bulbs.”
Some kind of mood had descended upon him while I was in the room. His voice drizzled into nowhere as he spoke.
“Whose room is that?” I asked, reaching for my tea.
“My daughter’s,” he said.
“Is she okay?” I asked.
He turned to me. His eyelids flickered lower. “She lives with her mother.”
“Where?”
“In Egypt.”
“Does she visit you?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“She is allergic to green,” he said.
He was looking out the window at his little side garden again, so I looked too, at the budding spring trees, half-lit by someone’s porch lamp, and at the hints of grass in the garden, peeking through winter. Soon enough, the whole town would be covered in green.
“All shades?”
“Every one,” he said.
“So why don’t you move to her?”
“I need it to live,” he said.
“Need what?”
“Green,” he said.
He turned back to the table and resumed what he had been doing before: pushing at the air with that faint, focused look on his face.
“Egypt has green,” I said, squinting.
“Not much,” he said. “In the southern part. Mostly browns and golds and blues.”
“A person isn’t allergic to a color,” I said.
He kept his eyes on the air between us. “Most people are not.”
I sipped my tea. I could not wait to tell all this to Arlene. “It’s not like cats,” I said.
He paused, his hand on the air. “I had this idea,” he said. “The other day. While drinking tea.”
“Or peanuts,” I said.
“While looking out this same window,” he said. “I thought that if a young woman ever happened to knock on my door, I would have a job for her. That the young woman could go into Nina’s room. And if she did, it would make the mark of young women and somehow it would bring her—my daughter—closer.”
He sorted some air to the right, some to the left.
“I would somehow summon your daughter?”
He nodded, briskly. “The way we put flowers in a room to bring joy,” he said. “The way we—” With a measured effort, he slowed his gestures and stopped messing with the air and folded his hands on the table.
I tipped back in my chair. I felt unusually comfortable in his house.
“By green, do you mean an environmental reference?” I asked.
He frowned. “No,” he said. “I mean actual green.”
“But, then, so what if I did summon her? She’d still be allergic, right?”
“Correct.”
“And you have green tile and green carpet and green hills on the wall.”
“Yes.”
“And you refuse to change your décor,” I said.
“I need it,” he said. “With less green, I get vertigo.”
“Oh, come on,” I said, balancing on the back chair legs. “Are you kidding? Did the lightbulb even need changing?”
“Of course,” he said, “those lightbulbs last twelve times longer.”
He pressed at his eyes with a napkin. I lifted my hands off the table for a second. Balanced. Swung the chair back down. “Oh,” I said, “speaking of flowers. I think I may’ve spilled some of yours on the bed.”
He finished his tea. Dabbed his mouth dry.
“There are no flowers in that room,” he said.
“The dried ones in the Ohio flora book?” I said, sipping my tea.
He peered at me.
“Purple?” I said. “Purple petals?”
He rose.
“Was that bad?” I said.
We headed up together, past Hovick’s pastures. As soon as he walked into the small bedroom, he knelt at the edge of the bed, his knees on the slippers, his hands clutching at the flower petals, clutching and letting go, like they were the most special thing in the world to him.
I watched for a minute. I could not tell what he was feeling. “I’m very sorry,” I said. “I don’t know why I did that.”