A Half Painted Fence

It happened in the middle of summer.

Our parents had already left for work hours ago and my sister, just old enough to be entrusted with a nine-year-old kid who once kicked a lamp off of a nightstand while taking a nap on the couch, was playing legos with me.

The car, a white truck with ladders and hoses, parked outside our house and the noise they made was just enough to make us peak open the curtains and watch as two men climbed out of the vehicle to ring our doorbell.

Almost every child who has ever been left alone at home will know this one sacred rule that parents will never let them forget- never open the door for strangers and when someone knocks on the door, don’t even let them know that you’re home.

It wasn’t the first time where someone came to our house when it was just my sister and I but it was the first time where they didn’t leave.

Unlike every other person who would ring the door a second time before leaving when no one opens it, these two men returned to their car- not to get in and drive away but to pull out their ladder, set it on our closed driveway gate, and then proceed to climb over it so that they could get to the other side.

It’s a child’s worst nightmare to be home alone and witness men you didn’t know cross into private property with a ladder and cans and... and paint.

My thoughts had jumped from people at our door to home invasion real quick but the movies had never told me anything about robbers needing paint to pick locks.

As we watched them walk just far enough to the point where we couldn’t tell what they were doing, my sister decided that she should call our mom and after a quiet discussion where I could hear the stress in our mom’s voice make her words tight and deeper than her normal tone, she decided to call the police.

In the end, they were neither wannabe robbers or extremely aggressive door-to-door salesmen. Instead, they were fence painters who hired by our neighbors and then given the address to their house- an address that was, in fact, one number off.

And when my parents came home, they learned that the fence painters were given just enough time to paint a decent chunk of our fence a dark brown. Our fence was a light yellow, the same wood and paint that we had since we bought the house six years ago, and the new and shiny coat of dark brown was very noticeable and very bad.

The next day, it also brought us a bill where we were charged for a painted fence that was half done and not even wanted and much to my parents’ frustration, our neighbors did not return our calls when we asked them to pay for it.

It took two months before we finally got rid of the bill. Now all we had was the fence.

But it wasn’t an easy problem to get rid of. My parents, who were the type of people who would rather do things themselves instead of spending money to have others do it for them, spent a decent amount of time trying to find the shade of brown that the painters used on our fence in hopes of finishing the job as they had long ago resigned themselves to a new dark brown fence.

But they could never get the shade right and time passed quickly because they were busy people with jobs and two young children who had a new activity every two days.

So I continued living in a house with a half-painted fence and three years would go by before my parents finally decided to buy a dark enough coat that could cover up both the old and new paint and though it took a whole three layers to make everything look even, we finally got a fence that wasn’t two colors.