Noah's Wife by Lindsay Starck

same person. One morning he visits the dank offices of the town bank to assess the state of the church’s finances, and that afternoon he rounds up a pair of burly high school seniors to work as his construction crew. They roll their eyes and agree to his offer. With school out for the summer and the movie theater gone out of business, what else is there to do in this town?
    â€œThe situation isn’t as bad as you might think,” Noah tells his wife. “The floors and the fans, yes, we’ll work on restoring those. But Mauro was wrong about the pipes and the electrical equipment—that’s all fine. The windows and the roof we’ll check. And the painting, sure. The mildew. You know.”
    Every morning he bolts down his cup of coffee and then heads up the hill to the church, his folder of notes tucked underneath his raincoat, to direct his sullen, ragtag work crew to various parts of the building. With them he carries in unwieldy boards of lumber and panes of glass. He ascends a ladder into the rafters, where he washes the windows with bleach and clears out the leaves and the debris. The birds watch him warily—a flock of bright button eyes in the dark. When one of the boys asks Noah what he wants to do about the birds he turns and gazes through the broken panels of stained glass, sees the rain falling coldly into the trees, and decides to leave them where they are.
    â€œWhat harm are they doing anyone, really?” he asks his wife, who is kneeling nearby. She opens a can of paint and turns to him.
    â€œNo harm at all,” she assures him. She moves the step stool to the wall, pulls out a small nylon brush, and begins swiping broad stripes of cream-colored paint around one of the door frames. Noah stands for a moment and watches her work: steady, even, silent. Her hair is pulled back and she is wearing one of his old button-down shirts, several sizes too large for her. Before he returns to his crew, he leans in and kisses the shirttail that hangs over her hip.
    â€œI love you,” he says. “I love that you’re here.”
    Where else would she be, if not here? What would she be doing, if she were not helping him? As she paints she thinks about the job that she left in the city, remembers the displeasurethat darkened the face of the owner when she told him that she was leaving the studio.
    â€œTemporarily?” he pressed her.
    â€œFor good,” she murmured.
    â€œWell,” he said, grudgingly handing over her last paycheck, “I want you to know that your job will still be here if you ever change your mind.”
    Although she left her work with some regret, she feels somewhat relieved now to be away from it, away from the disjunction between illusion and reality that photography implies. Sometimes she would hear couples screaming at each other in the parking lot on their way into the studio, and yet when they were in front of the backdrop, facing the lens after she had settled them down on their stools with flowers or props, they would kiss or lean into each other’s arms as if they were always this content to be together. In one of her dresser drawers at home she has a framed photograph of her own family from when she was an infant: her sister perched upon their mother’s knee, both of them smiling broadly into the camera, the baby cradled between them. The apparent tranquillity and the stability they present to the viewer are what Noah’s wife marvels over time and again. In real life her family was reckless and desperate, and if she herself has turned out to be somewhat of a skeptic, if she sometimes finds it hard to reconcile the appearance of a picture with the reality of things as they are, perhaps this photograph is the reason why.
    Her sister—a full five years older than her and born of adifferent father—liked to remind her younger sibling that she was an accident, a mistake made by a mother who had never wanted the first child