“Damn it.” She ripped the latest attempt off the easel and tossed it to the ground.
“It’s never easy to start a thing,” Anita said, barely looking up. “I guess that’s what separates the dreamers from the doers.”
Elizabeth sighed, unaware until that moment that she was breathing badly again. “I used to know how to do this.”
“In high school, I spoke Spanish.”
Elizabeth got the point. Skills came and went in life. If you wanted one back, sometimes you had to dig deep to find it. She walked out to the water and stood there, staring out. She let the colors seduce her, reveal themselves in their own way and time.
She was doing it incorrectly. Trying to impose her will on the paper. That was a level of skill she had lost. Now what she needed to do was feel. Be childlike with wonder again.
She released another breath and went back to the easel. She set everything up again. And waited.
Sea air caressed her cheeks, filled her nostrils with the scents of drying kelp and baking sand. The steady, even whooshing of the waves became music. She swayed along with it. This time, when she lifted her brush and dipped it in paint, she felt the old magic.
For the next few hours, she worked at a furious, breathless pace. Finally, she drew back and looked critically at her work.
In a palette of pale blue and rose and lavender, she’d captured the dramatic, sloping coastline and the glistening curve of sand. The distant peak of Dagger Rock was barely discernable, a dark shadow amidst a misty blue-white sky. A few strokes of red and gray formed a couple, far off in the distance, walking along the sand. But something was wrong …
“Why, Birdie, that’s beautiful.”
Elizabeth practically jumped out of her skin. She’d been so intent on her subject that she hadn’t even heard Anita walk up. “I can’t seem to get the trees right.”
“You’re missin’ the angle. See how they lean backwards? As if the wind’s been pushin’ ’em for a thousand years and they’ve given up.”
Given up.
In the face of great pressure, they’d quit trying to grow straight. Not unlike what Elizabeth had done in her marriage. She dabbed her brush in the paint and went back to work.
It felt as if only a few minutes had passed when Anita said, “Oh, lordy, it’s past two o’clock. We need to get to the house. Hurry up!” She stuffed her knitting back in her bag and started toward the stairs.
Elizabeth watched her stepmother go. Anita was really huffing and puffing up those stairs. You’d think there was a prize to the winner.
She picked up her supplies, carefully held her painting with two fingers and climbed the steps behind Anita. Elizabeth was almost to the top when she smelled smoke. “Anita? Do you smell that?”
And there were voices, as if a radio were turned on high.
Elizabeth came to the top of the stairs and paused, looking around.
Balloons poked through the open windows of her house and drifted upward. Suddenly the front door banged open. Marge, Anita, and Meghann—Meghann!—crowded onto the porch, singing, “Happy Birthday.”
Elizabeth almost dropped her stuff. No one had ever thrown her a surprise party before.
Meghann rushed toward her, arms outstretched. She wrapped Elizabeth in a fierce hug, whispering, “You didn’t think I’d miss it, did you? Happy birthday.”
Then all three of them were there, laughing and talking at once.
Elizabeth couldn’t remember the last time she’d felt so special. She’d always been the one who organized everyone else’s birthday parties and cooked the food and bought the presents. Even on her own birthday, she’d written detailed gift lists and made her own cake.
She saw Anita, standing over by a brand-new red barbecue.
Marge took the still-damp watercolor from her. “Oh, Birdie, this is exquisite. Is it for me?”
The compliment warmed her. “Of course.”
After Marge walked away, Meghann moved closer. “Anita planned all this, you know. Even sent me a plane ticket.” She smiled. “Like I couldn’t afford it.” She sobered. “It’s not what I would have expected of her. You know, after all the Anita-the-Hun stories.”
Elizabeth flinched. She’d come up with that nickname in eighth grade history class; it had sunk into Anita like a fishhook. In the past few days, it had haunted Elizabeth, shamed her. “She’s not who I thought she was,” Elizabeth said. “I’ll be right back.”
She walked across the yard.
Anita had pulled an intricately knitted lavender cardigan over her linen dress. Her hair was drawn back into a thick white coil. She was bent over, busily moving oysters from a tin bucket onto the grill. At Elizabeth’s approach, she straightened. “Surprise.”
“This is all your doing,” Elizabeth said.