Love Starts with Elle(33)
“When you go back to NewYork, she’ll go kicking and screaming.”
“Probably.” He propped his arms on top of the short windshield, taking in the blue sky, the bank of palmettos and scrub oaks, the eagle drifting on the current. “This is beautiful.”
Heath tried to imagine Ava standing next to him, but couldn’t conjure up her image as clearly as he could a month ago. Lately, he’d crossed a major hurdle where life had become his, not theirs.
“Why writing and the law?” Elle ventured, watching the opposite bank. “Rio, Tracey-Love, look over there. Dolphin.”
“Why art?” Heath dashed to the back of the boat as the girls arched over to the side. “Want to warn me next time, Elle?”
Dolphin were rushing fish to the shore and eating them out of the water.
“What yummy dinner, girls. Live bait.” Elle rubbed her tummy, making ummm sounds. Rio wrinkled her nose with an “Ooo, yuck, Auntie Elle.”
A single dolphin swam alongside the boat. Heath barely hung on to Rio as she dove to “pet the fish.” The sleek-backed gray dolphin kept speed with the boat, surfacing, then diving, surfacing again.
“H-he’s got a hole in his head.” Tracey-Love wiggled her hand trying to touch it.
“He ’posed to.” Rio, the expert.
“It’s his air hole, how he breaths.” Heath pulled the girls back to the bench seat. “Come on, settle back. You’re leaning too far.”
Elle upped the throttle, lifting her chin to the light, the air raking through her unbound hair. Yeah, Heath was definitely entering in a new phase. It’d been a lot of years since another woman fascinated him.
“What’s next for you?” he asked as she slowed the engine, nearing an unanchored fishing skiff.
“Open another gallery,” she said over her shoulder. “And forget I was almost married.”
Heath moved next to her. “You never answered. Why art?”
Elle pushed her blowing hair away from her face. “My first memories are of drawing on bulletins in church, racing for the colored pencils and pictures in Sunday school. I decorated the hallways at home, the kitchen counters, even watercolored over all Mama and Daddy’s wedding pictures.”
Heath laughed. “How old were you?”
“Old enough to know better, but seriously, I had these new watercolors and I thought, These black-and-white’s need some help.”
“Well, it’s hard to argue with that logic.” He squinted toward the shore thinking he needed to pick up sunglasses for himself and Tracey-Love on his next Wal-Mart run.
“I became very acquainted with my room over the years. If you know what I mean. Spent a lot of time sitting on the bed ‘thinking about what I’d done.’”
“That would’ve never worked for me. I’d have planned how to perfect it for the next time.”
“This is why Daddy says all children should be girls.”
“Well, if there were only girls . . .”
Elle laughed. “No biology lesson necessary here, Heath.”
“Ava and I weren’t going to have children. We were thirty-four when TL came along.”
“What changed your mind?”
“My wife’s feet.”
“This I got to hear.”
“Yeah, weird, right. But she had these really long, gorgeous feet just like her mom. We started talking about the lineage of the long, lean feet and next thing you know, we’re into a serious philosophical discussion about how our decision to not procreate is ruining our families’ heritages. Eleven months later . . .”
Elle looked at him through dark Ray-Bans. “Why didn’t you want children?”
“We wanted fast-track careers. Foolish. But then, it was all we knew. So what about you? When did you have the big revelation that art was your life?”
“I went on a field trip with my art class to the New York Met and encountered a Childe Hassam painting. I was sixteen, loved art, but had never been moved before. His work brought tears to my eyes. Until then, I didn’t know art could speak. I was hooked on the idea of being a painter and communicating through colors, images, brush strokes.”
“Do you paint? Why the gallery? I’ve been around enough galleries to know it’s time consuming.”
She steered the boat along the curves of the creek. “After four years of college and a year in Florence, not shaking or rattling the art world, I decided I wasn’t good enough to make a living as a painter, so I funneled my love for art into a gallery. My friends swear it’s all I talked about in high school anyway.”
“Verbalizing your back-up plan in case the real deal didn’t work out?”
She lifted her glasses and looked at him. “Yeah, maybe. Anyway, I took my Aunt Rose’s inheritance to open the gallery. Might as well help artists who were good enough but just needed opportunity. I liked educating the public too, helping them experience what I did when I saw the Hassam paintings.”
Elle powered up the engine and entered the Intracoastal Waterway. Heath stepped back to the girls. Rio’s wide grin was sure to be a nice gnat catcher.
“I think Rio has the need for speed.”
Elle glanced back. “More?”
“More.” Rio yelled, clinging to the top rail while Tracey-Love clung to Heath.