My dad runs a one- sometimes two-man painting business which he fronts as an actual painting business with a crew and everything but it's really just him and sometimes me, who is the second man on weekends. Clients ask him how long it'll take to do, say, two thousand square feet of interior plus ceilings and he always lies. He tells them a couple days. And he gets away with it because he knows no one else can match his rates on account of his extremely low overhead. One day he shows up outside my anatomy lecture, his tinny work van idling in white smoke. He's waving his hand out the window like he's trying to scoop me up. So I go with him. He's just been contracted to paint some dead couple's house white. The realtor said the family just wants it sold and that's what'll sell, he says. My dad hands me a five gallon bucket of matte base white Ben by Benjamin Moore and tells me to go nuts. The house is big, so he starts downstairs in the living room and I start upstairs in the primary bedroom. I expect it to be empty, and I'm surprised when everything is still there, or, what I assume is everything: a twin bed on one side of the room, an adjustable hospital bed on the other, clothes in the closet, so many framed pictures of the dead couple and their giant, beautiful family crowding the space on top of an heirloom dresser. I go back downstairs and find my dad, the first coat of paint already rolled on three walls. His boots are tracking paint on the shag carpet. He says don't worry, they're ripping out the carpet next week.