“That was Greg bringing me breakfast, unprompted.”
“How are the eggs?”
Claire looked at the plate. The eggs were slightly overcooked. The toast was a shade past golden, and the orange juice was in a wine glass because Greg apparently couldn’t find a regular glass or didn’t even think to look.
“They’re perfect,” Claire said.
CHAPTER 16
Claire hadn’t held a paintbrush in twenty-seven years, and the first thing she did with one was drop it. It slipped right out of her fingers and landed on the drop cloth with a loud, wet slap, leaving a streak of blue across the canvas of the woman standing next to her. This was not the impression Claire had been hoping to make within the first ninety seconds of a painting class.
The woman, who was a retired dentist named Phyllis, had signed up because her therapist told her she needed a creative outlet. She looked at the blue streak on her canvas.
“Well, I was going to paint a sunset. I guess I’ll have a river now. I guess I can work with that.”
Claire apologized four times. Phyllis told her to stop apologizing and start painting, advice Claire needed in several areas of her life.
The class was at a studio in downtown Beaufort, a bright converted warehouse space with exposed brick and tall windows. The instructor was a woman named Marianna, who wore paint-splattered overalls and talked about color the way most people speak about religion. She had wiry, unruly brown hair with streaks of gray in it and looked like she’d probably been living in a commune at some point.
She had set up twelve easels in a loose semicircle, each with a blank canvas and a set of acrylics. There was also a jar of water and a collection of brushes in various sizes. The whole arrangement looked inviting and terrifying.
Most people wouldn’t think a painting class was a big adventure, but she’d chosen it because she’d been sketching since karaoke night, filling her notebook with waves, marshes, and the view from her porch at sunrise. The sketching had awakened something buried so deep that she’d almost forgotten it was even there.
She used to paint in college, before Greg, before the kids, before a third-grade classroom and pantry organization had overtaken her life. Before twenty-six years of making everything beautiful for everyone else but herself. She used to stay in the art building at the College of Charleston until two o’clock in the morning, smelling of turpentine and paint.
And they weren’t that great, but they came from a place inside her that didn’t have any countdown or to-do list.
She stopped painting when it got practical, which was another way of saying she’d stopped painting when she got scared. Scared that it wouldn’t lead anywhere, scared that she wasn’t good enough, scared that wanting something just for herself would come off as selfish, because the world had told Claire Morrison that a good woman was a useful woman, and painting was not really useful.
Painting was indulgent. It was the kind of thing you did before you had responsibilities. But once responsibilities arrived, painting went into a closet, and that closet got smaller and smaller until you forgot there was even a door.
Harper was at the easel to Claire’s left. She was looking at her brushes with an intensity as if she were evaluating all the proper tools for the job. She’d arranged them by size, of course. Nina was to Claire’s right, running her fingers over the canvas.
“Okay, everyone,” Marianna said, clapping to bring the room to attention. She had the energy of someone who had drunk six espressos that morning. “Today is not about technique. It’s about making something pretty. It’s about making something honest. I just want you to paint what you feel, not what you see or what you think. I want what’s actually happening inside of you right now, in this room, on this day.”
“What if what I feel is just confused?” asked a man who looked like he had probably been dragged there by his wife.
“Then paint confused,” Marianna said. “Confused has a color. It might actually have several.”
Harper leaned toward Claire. “What color is confused? I think maybe I’m confused.”
“For you, probably the color of a spreadsheet that doesn’t balance.”
“Ooh, that’s red.”
“Confused is definitely red then.”
“Start there,” Marianna said, because she had heard them. “Start with whatever shows up first. You can always paint over it later.”
Claire picked up a brush, a new one, not the one she’d dropped. She dipped it in the blue, the color of the accidental river on Phyllis’s canvas, and touched it to the white surface.
The mark was small, a single curved line. Could have been a wave or a road or the beginning of something she hadn’t named yet.
And then she made another mark and another mark. The brush moved, and Claire’s brain suddenly shut up for the first time in a long time because painting was the one thing that had always done this for her. Silenced the inner organizer, the woman who counted to three.
Painting operated on a different frequency. And Claire had forgotten how much she needed that frequency.
Harper, of course, approached painting the same way she approached everything in her life: with immense strategy. She looked at her canvas for a whole three minutes before even touching it. Then she picked out two brushes, a medium and a fine, and laid out four colors as if she were planning a quarterly report. Then she began to paint, and what emerged was architectural, sharp lines, geometric shapes, precise. It looked like a blueprint for a building that hadn’t been built yet, and it was actually good. Harper had an eye for structure, but it was also what Claire expected, because Harper’s painting looked like Harper, organized, impressive, and completely contained.
