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It was supposed to be the spring project.
She reluctantly went to Home Depot with him and joked about having hot dogs by the patio tables that were on display for sale rather than for people to rest and, well, eat their hot dogs.
The mega home improvement store made sure its customers knew that the hot dog had nothing to do with them, but everyone who went to the stand got the Home Depot Special, which was a hot dog, a soda, and three paper towels without a straw. The hot dog vendor should be proud, Mulder thought, because Scully wouldn’t even touch the meatballs at Ikea.
Home Depot was two hours away, and they went twice, returning empty-handed both times. He saw Scully eyeing the plants and the fruit trees and the swing but didn’t say anything about it. They were there to get fence stuff.
Mulder had googled how to build a fence for two afternoons. He had never worked on putting a fence together nor repairing one with his dad. They hired people for that sort of thing. His father worked hard to ensure the kind of life he wanted, and clearly did not have time for fences, like he did not have time for his family, and Mulder was determined to be a different man.
Somehow, like his father, he also had to lose a child. It seemed like sometimes history repeated itself even when choices were made differently.
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I’m building a fence, he said to Scully. How hard can it be?
Mother Nature was against him that year. It rained for two weeks straight after he had figured out the way to build the kind of fence he’d convinced Scully that she would like. The fence project required math and lots of measuring, and Mulder bet she would love that.
Somehow the fence project got wayward, and they painted their bedroom instead, picking different color cards at Lowe’s rather than Home Depot this time because the sales associate at the paint department was a creep and kept bothering Scully.
“He’s just a 22-year-old kid, Mulder.”
“And why would you know he’s 22, Scully? Think about that.”
She wasted her breath on the reasons why he never needed to worry about another man. He made his point that he didn’t like it when men bothered her, and that was that.
The older gentleman who helped them mix paint at Lowe’s reminded them of Frohike, but they just smiled at each other; no words were exchanged because they knew what the other person was thinking. A total Frohike, down to the vest and the gloves, granted that the vest was red and the gloves were spotted with paint.
Picking a color they both liked for the bedroom was difficult, expectantly so. So many cards looked mustard yellow to him that Scully wanted to cry. Colors Mulder couldn’t see were out, naturally. Colors that were made up of colors he couldn’t see were also vetoed. He saw a lot of grays, too, they realized. A lot of things are gray in his eyes.
But not her. Of course not her. She’s what has brought colors to his life since 1993.
Mulder grew restless as the summer raged on; it was too hot to work outside, she said. The ground was too wet to put in posts, she said. She wanted to go on a picnic instead, she said. She thought they could go to the beach, she said.
He did all the math and took out his trusty spray paint, and she came out to watch him with lemonade twenty minutes into 9am. She wanted to talk about him spraying x’s on public roads, and somehow they ended up spending the whole day in their newly painted bedroom.
He cleared a part of the backyard and laid down a tarp, announcing his cedar picket would hang out there after they got delivered in two days, and there goes another afternoon of the two of them making out on the said tarp.
She got sunburned.
It didn’t take a genius to see that Scully didn’t really want him to do it. Mulder was, after all, an Oxford graduate, and he knew putting up a fence was a lot easier than removing one.
“Baby,” with his arms around her, on their silk bedspread that matched the newly painted walls—it took Mulder a while to figure out it was the new walls that matched the old sheets and not the new sheets for the new walls—he began speaking in a tone as if he needed to convince her that they were going to Chaney, Texas, again. “Do you not think I’d be able to build you a fence?”
“I don’t want a fence,” she said sleepily.
“It could up the value of the house,” he quipped weakly.
She did not dignify his joke with a response.
“We can go with the French Gothic ones. Even if we make the order, we can still change our mind. Remember that guy who kept talking about our curb appeal?” He nudged her legs with his.
“We don’t need a fence, Mulder.”
Finally, she breathed. She also had on the expression that said she thought he was being silly to think that vampires—if they existed, but they didn’t—could be Texan or that the Loch Ness Monster—another creation of the imagination—would willingly reside in Georgia of all places. “We got no neighbors for miles. We don’t need privacy from anyone out here, and we don’t need it to keep animals in or out of our property. We also don’t need to ever worry about curb appeal.”
“But...” He panicked, not sure why he was feeling that way. “But... they’re nice. I can give you a nice house with a white picket fence, and we can get a dog now. One of ‘em monsters from your mother.”
His suggestions sounded more like pleas somehow.
“Mulder,” Scully stroked his cheek and petted his face as if he were a Scottie terrier. She liked the beard more than she liked to admit, it seemed. “Honey, why would I want a white picket fence when I can have...so much more?”
“So much more?” He repeated her words like he was slow.
“Yes, Mulder. So, so much more.” They kissed, and celebrated the newly painted walls in their bedroom again.