Lorelei's Secret by Carolyn Parkhurst Page A

that. That’s exactly the thought you had while you were doing it, but you decided that since you’d already gotten your work done and you had some free time, it was probably okay. But enough about you. Let’s talk about me.’
    ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘What are you like?’
    ‘Well, let’s see. I am a brilliant man, a wonderful professor, and I’m sweet and caring, and I can be very sexy
    in a befuddled sort of way.’
    ‘Stop,’ I said. ‘You’re making yourself blush.’
    ‘Now, you, Lexy, are going to get up and open a bottle of wine and make your husband a wonderful dinner.’
    ‘No,’ I said. ‘You’ll make dinner. You insist.’
    The next day, I nailed two hooks into the wall over the couch and hung our masks there. They are there still, the faces of Paul and Lexy, smiling and newly wed, presiding over everything I do. Now, when I lift the Lexy mask off its hook, I can run my fingers over all the curves of her face.
    Here is her nose, and here is her chin. Here are the holes where her eyes should be. Here are her own lips, though rendered forever stiff and hard, which I once kissed in every room of this house.
     
    And another day - I sink into the memory as if it were a warm bath - another day, I came home to find that Lexy had painted the kitchen while I was at work. We had
    spoken once or twice about doing something to brighten the room, but months had passed, and we still hadn’t gotten around to going to the paint store and picking out a color.
    That morning, I’d drunk my coffee in a room with the same dingy beige walls that had been there since before I moved in, but when I came home, I found my wife sitting in a room with walls the color of pale sunshine.
    ‘So what do you think?’ she asked, smiling up at me as I walked into the kitchen. It was a cool night, but she had the back door open to let the evening air wash away the smell of fresh paint.
    ‘I love it,’ I said, looking around. ‘It looks great. I can’t believe you did all this.’
    ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘It was more work than I expected. But I wanted to get it done before you got home.’
    ‘It’s wonderful,’ I said. ‘What a nice surprise.’ I bent to kiss her. She had a smudge of yellow paint just above her top lip.
    ‘There’s another surprise, too,’ she said. ‘But you’re going to have to find it yourself.’
    ‘Here in the kitchen?’
    She nodded.
    I looked around, but I couldn’t see anything else that was different. I opened a cupboard and scanned its contents.
    ‘Chickpeas,’ I said, pulling out a can. ‘What a nice surprise.’
    She laughed. ‘That’s not it.’
    ‘Are these new sponges?’ I asked, picking one up from the sink ledge.
    ‘Relatively. But that’s not it either.’
    I went through the kitchen slowly, going through the cabinets, picking up mugs, heads of garlic, decorative platters we never used. ‘I give up,’ I said finally.
    ‘You’ll find it,’ she said. ‘Eventually.’
    I found it the next morning. I was sitting at the table, having breakfast, when I looked up from my newspaper and saw, toward the top of the wall in front of me, the word ‘you’ glinting in a square of sunlight. The word was almost transparent; it was only the slant of the morning sun that made it visible. Trailing my eyes farther along the wall, I saw the word I and the word ‘love,’ followed again by the word ‘you.’ Following the line of words across the top edge of the wall, I could see that Lexy had written ‘I love you’ over and over again, a hidden border that could only be seen in the morning light.
    Lexy came into the kitchen just then and saw me looking up. ‘Did you find it?’ she asked.
    I got up and put my arms around her. ‘I found it,’ I said.
    ‘It’s a translucent glaze,’ she said. ‘I think you’ll be able to see it every morning.’
    And I do. In the beginning, right after Lexy died, I avoided the kitchen during those morning hours. If I had to go into the room, I