“Well, then, this is a homecoming. Welcome back.”
Claire looked at her canvas again. The dusty rose color was right there in the center, surrounded by blues and golds. It looked like nothing and everything at the same time. She stood there in front of it and felt something she hadn’t felt since all those years ago in the art building at the College of Charleston at two in the morning. The pure joy of making something that didn’t need to justify its existence.
Oh, gosh, she was crying. Not the controlled tears she’d perfected for sad movies, but real tears that came when something locked opened up. She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, got paint on her face, and then just didn’t wipe it off.
“You know you have paint on your face,” Harper said.
“I know.”
“Well, are you gonna wipe it off?”
“No.”
Harper looked at her. She dipped her finger in the orange from her own canvas and drew a streak on her cheekbone. “There, now we match.”
Nina looked at both of them. She picked up her brush and loaded it with gold from her marsh sunrise and then painted a stripe across the bridge of her nose. “War paint,” she said.
Phyllis, the retired dentist, looked at the three of them from behind her accidental river canvas. “Y’all are my kind of people.”
The room started laughing, and Marianna shook her head and smiled.
Claire stood between her two best friends with blue all over her face and a painting on the easel that she was going to take home and hang on the wall of her guest room. She realized it wasn’t a guest room at all anymore. It was becoming hers, a room of her own, a place that she had claimed not as a refuge from her marriage, but as a declaration of herself, a place where her sketchbooks lived and her paintings would hang.
She would tell Greg about it tonight. She would say, “I want to keep the guest room as my studio.”
He would say, “Okay,” because Greg was learning to say okay to things he didn’t fully understand.
She would show him the painting, and he might get it, and he might not.
And either was fine.
They all cleaned up together, washed their brushes, and carefully carried their wet canvases to Claire’s car. They loaded the trunk, arranging the paintings so they wouldn’t touch.
“Your painting is touching my painting,” Harper said.
“They’re wet. They’re going to touch.”
“My painting doesn’t want to be touched.”
“Your painting is abstract chaos, Harper. It can handle contact,” Claire said.
Nina placed hers carefully in the back seat, propped up against the headrest like a passenger. “I’m going to give this to Elena,” she said.
“Really?” Claire asked, looking at her.
“It’s the view from the kitchen, the view David loved. Elena’s never had a painting of it. She has photos, of course, but not a painting.” Nina touched the window. “She’ll pretend she doesn’t like it. She’ll say something about how the egrets look too thin, or the water is the wrong shade of silver, and then she’ll hang it in her kitchen and never take it down.”
Claire thought about Elena, five feet of fury and love, hanging Nina’s painting in her kitchen next to the saints and the photos of David. She thought about the thread that connected all of them. Every act of love in this story passed through food or art, the mole, the index cards, the food, and now the painting. All of those things, whether food or art, said the same: I made this with my hands, and it’s for you. It carries the memory of everyone who made it before me.
“One more,” Claire said, looking at her friends across the car. “One more adventure.”
“Yeah, the big one,” Harper said.
“Skydiving,” Nina said.
They stood in the parking lot with paint on their faces, and the word skydiving hung in the air between them.
“Are we really ready for something like that?” Claire asked.
