It was such a small thing.A man telling her to set the weight down for a little while.She’d carried it alone so long she’d forgotten what it was like to stop parenting for a minute at all.And here he was, offering her a break as if it were no big deal.
She found the art tent by accident, looking for shade.
It was a long canvas pavilion at the end of the street, and inside it was the Children’s Art Exhibition, hung with the delightful earnestness of a small town that took its children seriously.Crayon suns.Watercolor horses with too many legs.A construction-paper collage that might have been the lake or possibly an explosion.And in the section roped off for the older kid’s entries, hung a drawing that stopped Sunny cold.
She knew the hand before she’d read the card.She had been finding drawings done by it on the backs of envelopes and grocery lists for years.
Presley had drawn the lake at the gray hour just before the light came up, the water flat and waiting, a single heron standing in the shallows with hunched patience.There was a loneliness to it that tugged at Sunny’s heart.And under that stoic stillness was a structure to the image so sure of itself that it took her breath away.
She was so used to seeing Presley’s drawings that it had been a while since she really stopped to look at one.But seeing it like this, displayed out of its usual environment, made her really look at it.
She’d drawn the bones of the scene and let the bones show.
“It’s really wonderful, isn’t it?”a voice said beside her.
Sunny turned.The woman beside her was perhaps sixty, silver-haired, and well dressed.She was looking at the drawing fixedly.
“It is, yes.”
“I’d love to meet the child who drew it,” the woman said.“You don’t happen to know who this Presley Carter is, do you?”
“Actually, I do.I’m her mother.”
“Susan Vance.”A card appeared, neat and cream-colored: VANCE ART GALLERY, with an Apple Pie Creek address.“I judge this contest every year.Most girls your daughter’s age draw horses with ...great enthusiasm.”She said it without unkindness.
“But once in a while, some ten-year-old comes along and does that.”She nodded at the drawing.“She’s got an artist’s eye.You can’t teach that.You can only hope someone or something doesn’t ruin it before it can be fully developed.”
Sunny’s throat tightened at the thought that she might have inadvertently done something to ruin Presley’s talent.Without ever realizing it was there.“She draws all the time.On everything.”
“Good.Don’t stop her.”Susan Vance studied the drawing a moment longer.“I’d like to show this piece.My art gallery does a youth wall in the fall, and I’d like to buy this one outright for it.An actual sale, the way I’d buy from any artist whose work I mean to hang.I believe in treating artists of any age with the same respect for their work.”She glanced sidelong at Sunny for the first time.“If her mother is agreeable, that is.”
“Her mother is agreeable,” Sunny managed.
“Tell her to come talk to me after the winners of the art contest are announced.”
She found Presley twenty minutes later by the lemonade stand.She told her without making a big deal of it that an art gallery owner wanted to buy her drawing of the heron on the lake and hang it in her gallery because it was good.Really good.It was real art.
Presley didn’t cry because Presley never cried where it could be seen.She’d inherited that from her mom, and Sunny was sorry for it every day.But she swallowed hard and nodded too fast before she finally broke into a smile.
“She can buy it, and I’ll draw another one for my room,” Presley said with the flat certainty of an artist.Sunny laughed and pulled her in for a hug.“I’m so proud of you.And not just because you’re such a talented artist.”
And for once her daughter let herself be hugged in public.
The country music concert started at two o’clock on a tall temporary stage built at one side of the town square.Makayla had been asked to be the opening act for a major country band that was on a summer tour of state fairs and local events.She’d been performing with a local bluegrass band made up of four gray-haired men, and they took their places on stage first.
Sunny understood belatedly why the WoWS had set up their chairs where they had, for they had an excellent and unobstructed view of the stage from the side.They also weren’t directly in the blast zone of the big speakers pointing out at the main crowd.
Makayla was eleven and built like a willow switch.She walked out on stage in pink cowboy boots, tucked her fiddle under her chin, and proceeded to play a reel so fast and clean that an old man in the second row took off his hat as though something holy were happening.
There was already a good-sized crowd seated on blankets, waiting for the main act, but by the end of Makayla’s first song, just about everybody else at the Founder’s Day event had crowded into the square as well.They clapped along, whooping, and whistling as Makayla fiddled the house down.
Behind the stage, the members of the country band stopped preparations for their show and moved around the side of the stage close to the WoWS to watch the phenom up on stage.Even they looked impressed.
The crowd went wild when the set with Makayla ended.The main act jogged up on stage while the crowd shouted for an encore and asked Makayla and her band if they’d like to do a song with them.The country act had a fiddler of its own, and he stepped forward to play beside Makayla.They played a classic song about dueling fiddles, and Makayla grinned cheekily as the two of them took turns trying to outplay each other.
She might be eleven, but she held her own against a seasoned music industry pro.The crowd went even wilder as they realized she was matching the pro note for note.When the song ended, Makayla waved to the crowd and trotted down the stage stairs into Tessa and Dillon’s hug, along with that of an elderly man Sunny didn’t recognize.Must be Makayla’s grandpa.
Sunny watched the four of them with a tiny twinge of envy.She and her kids were that tight a family unit too.But she missed having an adult partner like that to share it with.She missed having family around her.
