Hanna raised her chin toward the repurposed chafing dish at the end of the table. “Container one,” she said. Hundreds of tiny dark beads were sunk in turpentine like coffee grounds, the dirty oil clouding around them. “Those have been soaking overnight.”
“How late were you here?” Grace asked. Hanna’s eyes were as red rimmed as her own.
“One, maybe half past,” Hanna said. “Use the ceramic spoon to stir them around a bit, very gently, not breaking a single one. Then you will gently sieve them out, about fifty at a time, into container two.” She pointed to the large metal mixing bowl next to the chafing dish. “Move the beads into the clean turpentine, clean the sieve, and begin again, moving the beads to container three. Four through six contain a castile soap solution, and seven through ten are water. There will be at least a dozen batches of beads like this to move through the system.”
Hanna looked at Grace as though she were leaving her child in Grace’s care. “I know I don’t have to tell you how vital it is that you clean the sieve between each container, and especially between each solution.” Her pale eyes glowed brighter against the bloodshot. “Yes?”
Jacqueline trusted Grace to regild and re-leaf holy relics. Once, she had called Grace her “little spider,” and Grace, disturbed by the comparison, turned to Hanna to laugh about it and found her pink with jealousy. It didn’t matter that neither Grace nor Hanna had any great respect for Jacqueline—Hanna still needed to be the best.
“Yes,” Grace said now, smoothing her flyaways.
“I’ll perform the hand cleaning,” Hanna said. Her own table was set with a paper-lined tray of paintbrushes and magnifiers arranged like dental tools. “I’ll begin when you make it to container seven. Until then, I will be constructing a sheep out of wool to replace this one with the cracked neck.” She gave a dainty smile, showing her small, square teeth, and opened her palm to reveal what looked like a balled-up tissue held in a sweaty hand for two hundred years. The sheep’s barely discernible ears were suggestions cut from felt, smashed flat. Only two legs remained, scabby sticks protruding from dirty gray stuffing.
“Sad little fellow,” Hanna said, not concealing her glee. “No use rehabbing him. I’ll have to start from scratch!”
Grace bent over the chafing dish of turpentine. The smell reminded her of Riley, but she hardly needed reminding. The Record had reported that he had been drawing some in prison, what Cy Helmers had called “charcoal lines and squiggles.” Grace had winced at “squiggles,” but Cy Helmers hadn’t meant to become an art critic. Grace wished that she could see the drawings herself; they would help her understand Riley’s state of mind. What kinds of squiggles? Anxious like Twombly’s, dancing and light like Hockney’s swimming pools, or lightless and grim like Fautrier’s? Grace didn’t know whether to blame herself or Riley for the fact that she could think of his artwork only in terms of copies, of either real artists or real objects or real life—what was the difference? But she blamed Cy Helmers for his poor descriptive abilities. “Squiggles” could mean anything.
That the drawings were at all abstract was at first a wonder to Grace. Riley had always been an insistent realist, painting the historic buildings around town. His father used to refer to their house as the Garland Visitor’s Bureau. Grace had tried to push him toward abstraction, or at least pull him away from Garland, to no avail. Maybe he’d changed his style because in prison there were no historic homes to observe. More likely, he didn’t want to show off anymore.
He’d never painted his family’s own house. He said it was too familiar. His family’s house was far more special to her than it was to him, she knew.
? ? ?
Grace was not a Garland native. She’d been born in Louisville, Kentucky. Her mother was eighteen, her father nineteen. They’d met at a party after a Van Halen concert, Grace’s father once told her, but such details were rare. Her parents were unwilling to discuss anything before their marriage, before Garland, as though Grace had been a witness they’d expected to remain silent.
Her father’s parents had taken care of her until she was three, while her father was in college and her mother was somewhere else. She’d never been told where.
After that, Grace lived for varying stretches, some repeating, in North Carolina with her aunt Regina and her kids; in Smyrna with her father, after he dropped out of Tennessee State and took a job at the Nissan plant; in Paducah, Kentucky, with her mother and two other young women who, it turned out, were not willing to babysit their roommate’s kid when she was kept late at work; in Memphis, briefly, when her father was married to a woman named Irene who had bald eyebrows and made Grace spaghetti sandwiches before her bartending shifts; outside Chattanooga with her mother and an older man named Alan, who wore collared shirts tucked into chinos every day and had two grown children who did not seem to like Grace or her mother very much; and in Ocean City, Maryland, where Grace’s mother was waitressing when Grace’s father came up for the season to try to talk to her and make things right.
Her father came in June, and by August, Grace’s mother was pregnant. Her parents married and, together for the first time, they all marched back south to Garland. Grace was nine. She started fourth grade two weeks late and newly legitimate. When the teacher introduced her, Grace looked out from under her dark bangs and felt a thrill that not one of them knew who she had ever been before.
Grace’s family moved into a small white-sided ranch house behind the grocery store. Her mother planted white begonias in circles around the two small trees in the yard, and her father surrounded them with dyed-red mulch, which Grace noticed as soon as she noticed that the people in Garland’s nicer neighborhoods used mulch that was brown or black.
The house was nearly silent at first. The three of them had no idea how to interact. Any two people could be talking in a room, but when the third entered, the conversation would fall apart, all parties self-conscious and suddenly overwhelmed. Grace had always read a lot, and she’d seen so many adult faces slacken with relief when they found her engrossed in a book or a magazine, as though she had unintentionally absented herself from whatever forgotten carpool pickup line or tense phone call was in the background. Now she disappeared into her books again, hoping to ease the pressure on her parents, who even she could see were struggling to play the roles they had finally submitted to. She’d spent long stretches of her childhood in fictional worlds, and trapped in this new and uneasy diorama, what was real and what wasn’t began to seem uncertain. When Grace found a box of her father’s secret detritus in the basement that included several photos of Irene, she was relieved to see that she had not imagined that whole episode, among others.