Page 28 of Liquids

A cup? Okay. I could do that.

He puts on a pot of coffee as I hang my coat on the hooks by the door, and he takes a mug out of the cabinet. It’s an old one I bought years ago from a pottery studio on a trip out of town: a swirl of blues and grays. Placing it on the table, he takes a pencil and a pad and sits down. Heat swamps my body. I haven’t drawn in over ten years. I sit down next to him and pull another pad toward me, opening the box of colored pencils. It’s a wonderful array, with thirty or forty different colors.

“This is beautiful.”

“Beautiful pencils for a beautiful girl,” he says with another lip quirk, and I roll my eyes at him. I’m not sure what comments like this mean. Perhaps he’s being nice, Carly.

I put the colored pencils to one side and pick up an ordinary lead one, sketching a quick outline as he watches. My hand is shaking, but if he notices, he doesn’t say anything. He starts drawing on his pad, tongue between his teeth.

The focus comes back so fast. The concentration required to get the line just right, the shade and the shadows, trying to judge the color. Is this going to be black and white, or am I going to use the colored pencils? Maybe a watercolor wash?

I glance over at what he’s done, and he’s drawn a basic outline of the cup. It’s not half bad. “Good use of perspective,” I say.

He grunts. “I did art at school. Liked it, wasn’t terrible at it. But nothing like you.”

I shake my head at him. All the things I drew over the years, the pieces that won competitions that Dad used to send off without my knowing. How he’d squeeze my neck and say, “See? See? You’ll be a famous artist one day, mark my words.” It’s funny now that I’m older I can appreciate how he was saying that just to encourage his kid and how impossible it would have been for someone like me to become an artist. He did keep everything I ever drew, though. When Mom was committed and my uncle cleared out the house, so much stuff went missing—including all my drawings.

“What you thinking about?”

“My dad.”

“What about him?”

“He held on to all my pictures. Everything I ever drew.”

“Is that what those ones were I found the other day?”

I shake my head. “There were a lot more. Hundreds. Right from when I was in kindergarten through to all my work from college.” I laugh. “Like stick men whose heads are too big and animals with five legs.”

“Some animals have five legs.”

“No, they don’t.”

“Centipedes.”

“I think you’ll find they have a hundred legs.”

“That’s close to five.”

“Very close,” I say with a grin as I push my tongue out and shade in around the edge of the cup.

“What happened to the pictures?”

“I think they went in a dumpster. I never saw them when my uncle cleaned out the house.”

He studies me, and I know this look now: It’s what I call his punching walls face. “That sucks” is all he says.

“Yeah, it does. I loved some of that art. Spent a lot of time on it, too.”

“You have anything of your mom and dad’s?”

I stand up and head through to the bedroom, opening the doors to the closet. The inside is amazing, everything hung up and stacked in neat piles. I pull the plastic box down from the top shelf and carry it through to the kitchen.

“One day our neighbor called me and said someone was clearing out my mom’s house. I jumped in my car and raced home, and there was a huge dumpster outside. They were selling things on our drive. My uncle said my mom was being committed. I wasn’t surprised. She hadn’t been right for a while. I asked my uncle if I could keep anything, and he asked me where I thought I was going to put it. I ran around the house gathering as much stuff as I could before the guys clearing out the house threw it all out. Fortunately, they hadn’t started on my dad’s study. I told them to do that last when my uncle wasn’t listening. I forgot all about my paintings in the rush to save whatever I could of him and my mom.”

I unclip the lid of the box and pull out a handful of pictures. My parents on their wedding day, a picture of Dad in his service uniform that used to hang on the wall behind his desk. Photos of the three of us together, Dad and I playing tetherball in the backyard. I pulled everything out of the drawers in the study, stuffed it into bags in a panic, and threw everything I could in the back of my car.

Rig peers in the box and guffaws.