The Light of Paris(99)

“You drank the whole thing already? You lush!” he called back, pulling a chilled glass out of the cooler behind the outside bar and slipping it under the tap, letting the caramel liquid pour out, a thin foam settling on the top. I had never liked beer, but Henry made a cream ale that tasted of vanilla and sugar and I couldn’t get enough of it.

“No, Sharon stole mine,” I said, as he handed me the fresh glass, so cold it felt like it would burn my fingers. “Thank you.”

“You can have your own, you know,” he said to Sharon.

“It tastes so much better when it’s stolen.” Sharon drained the rest and held the empty glass out to him. “More, please,” she said, and then let loose a monumental belch.

“Well, when you put it like that.” Henry took the glass and headed back to the bar.

“Charming,” I said. “Really. You do that at the Ladies Association lunches?”

“I save it just for you,” Sharon said sweetly. “Speaking of which, I haven’t seen you there in a while.”

“I’ve been working. My landlord is a total nightmare if I’m late on rent,” I said, and Sharon punched me in the arm. My mother’s house had sold days after it had gone on the market, and when it looked like I would be staying in Magnolia for a while, I had moved into the carriage house on Sharon and Kevin’s property. It was tiny and the bathroom and closet doors banged into each other and the stove was the size of a toddler’s play set and it had a terrible spider problem, and I loved it. There was only one large room, with an antique iron bed against one wall, the kitchen in one corner, and the living area, which I had filled with an easel and canvases and tables covered with brushes and tubes of paint and rags sprayed with color. Every morning when I woke up, the first thing I saw was a spill of sunlight across the painting I was working on, and I could smell the grass and the garden outside and hear the twins laughing, and it always made me smile.

“Well, you’ve been missed. Ellen O’Connor asked about you just the other day.”

“Oh yeah? How’s she doing?”

Sharon shrugged. “I have no idea. I can’t read those people.”

“Yeah, well, they don’t want you to be able to.”

“I told her you were working at the art store and she said she might come by.”

“Really? That would be nice. She and I took art together in high school. She was good, actually. I wonder if she still draws.”

“I doubt she has time, what with all her playing maidservant to Ashley Hathaway.”

“Don’t be mean,” I said mildly. I hadn’t forgotten I had been equally mean about Ellen and Ashley and all the rest of them, but I also hadn’t forgotten how difficult it was to be anything other than what everyone else expected you to be.

In the end, leaving hadn’t been as painful as I had feared, or as easy as I might have wished. Phillip and I hadn’t spoken since the night I had left—he communicated everything through his lawyer and I mostly agreed, because I wanted it to end, because I didn’t care about the money and there wasn’t anything else there that mattered to me, including him, and mostly what I thought about now was how sad it was I had ever agreed to live that way.

My mother had moved into her condo, and we had dinner together there once a week, because the one time she had been to the carriage house she had nearly broken into hives at the sight of the spiders and the dust. She was too much in the habit of criticizing and complaining to stop, so I had decided to get out of the habit of taking it personally. I could see my mother’s words were my grandmother’s legacy of disappointment, and the best I could do was to live in a way that would break the cycle. I hadn’t been to the Ladies Association meetings, but I had signed up to work at the Collegiate Women’s Society rummage sale, and the Garden Society fundraiser. Just because I didn’t want to feel constrained by that world didn’t mean I couldn’t see all the good they did, and I wanted to be a part of that. On my terms.

But I spent most of my time working at Kira’s store, where I was surrounded by the smell of wood and paint and the sharp, clean aroma of new paper, and I always tried extra hard to talk to the kids who came in, especially the teenagers, with their shaggy hair and sharp, defensive edges, their cash wadded up in their pockets, their fingertips dark with pencil lead. I wanted to grab their hands as they took their purchases and tell them, “Do this forever. If this makes you happy, do this forever. Do the thing that feeds your soul and don’t let anyone else tell you that you are broken because of it.”

I never did. Instead, I sent them out the door with fresh charcoal and new watercolor sets and I waved and said, “Come back soon,” and hoped it would be enough of a benediction to carry them through.

“Dinner!” Wanee called, bouncing the screen door open and stepping out onto the porch, carrying a tray laden with food. Her husband followed with a similar tray, and then Henry and Pete, and everyone found their seats as we unloaded the serving dishes onto the table until it was so full there was hardly room for our plates, and we shuffled drinks and silverware and sacrificed our own elbow room for the sake of the meal. We had met at The Kitchen so we could eat outside—although, feeling the damp blanket of air on my arms, I wondered why—but Wanee had cooked. There were plates of fish cakes, fried golden-brown, and pyramids of summer rolls, sprigs of green Thai basil peeking out from the edges of the rice paper. In front of me was a platter of salad, cucumbers with frilled edges, fat red tomato slices from Henry’s garden, translucent onion, sprinkled with crushed peanuts and marinating in a dressing that smelled both sharp and sweet. There were endive cups filled with chicken and carrots, and homemade noodles and curries, and Henry set pitchers of lemonade and ice water and sweet tea in the middle of the table, and the sight of so much plenty made me both overwhelmed and grateful.