There had to be twenty-five sandpipers out there. They walked steadily on their little legs, picking at the sand. A few were squabbling, spreading their wings, beaks open. She selected one feisty sandpiper in particular and, putting pencil to paper, began to set up her sketch. She became aware that Bo was watching her. She turned her head, a question in her eyes.
Bo grinned, a little sheepishly. “Sorry. Does it bother you if I watch?”
“A little. I’m not used to it.”
“I’ll stop.”
“No, it’s okay,” she said quickly. “It’s silly of me.”
“How do you know where to begin?” he asked, looking at the blank paper.
“It depends on what kind of work I’m doing. When I’m out in the field using a tripod and a scope, first I just watch. I look at the angle of the body.” She began to sketch as she talked. “What are the bird’s posture, proportions, angles?” Her hand moved more quickly now over the paper. “The sandpiper has a plump body with balanced proportions. Now I’m getting a basic silhouette. Before getting to details, it’s more of a road map. I draw it as lightly as possible. See?” she said, showing him her sketch. “You can barely see it on the paper. Just a ghost of an image. Then I’ll take it back to the studio and add all the details. These little peeps have such personalities.”
“I can see the bird taking shape already.” Bo’s tone was one of admiration.
“I’ve got a long way to go. What about you?” Heather asked, eager to deflect the attention from herself and her process. “You found that piece of wood. How do you begin?”
“Well,” he said, scratching his jaw, “first I just look at the wood. I ponder it. Just that can take a long time. I don’t put a knife to the wood until I see where I’m headed. I can’t erase my mistakes. Whittling or sculpting is really a long series of decisions. When you make good ones, you have a product you like. When you make a bad one, you toss it and start again. And there are always lots of bad decisions. But the good ones are worth waiting for.”
Then they both set to work. They worked in a companionable silence, Heather absorbed in her sketches and Bo contemplating the piece of wood he’d picked up. Yet wordlessly, Heather felt their bond grow from this shared experience. She’d never imagined how such simple pleasures could bring so many fulfillments. After about an hour, she set her charcoal pencil down with a gusty sigh. “I’m spent,” she said. She glanced over at Bo’s piece of driftwood and gasped. “Whittling” didn’t do his work justice. Like magic, the lump of wood had somehow morphed into a dolphin.
“Oh, Bo!” she exclaimed. She’d had no idea he could create sculptures like that.
“It’s just a little something,” he said modestly.
“It’s beautiful.”
“I whittle wherever I am. If I have my pocketknife, I’m set.” He lifted the dolphin higher, twisting it to the left and right. “The tricky part is knowing when to stop.”
“You’ve inherited your uncle’s talent with woodworking, for sure.”
He raised a brow. “Do you think so?”
“Yes,” she said with conviction. Every time she was with him, he revealed some new facet of himself. He truly had the soul of an artist. He found beauty in everything. Even her. “Somehow you found this dolphin hiding in that piece of driftwood and freed her.”
He smiled and looked at her, unusually abashed for a man as confident as Bo. “Well, now . . .” He handed it to her. “It’s for you.”
“I’ll treasure it forever,” she said, letting her finger run along the rough wood from the rostrum to the tail fluke.
The day could not have been more perfect—yet something was niggling at Heather that she couldn’t quite shake. “I was just thinking, we’ve had such a great morning . . . it’s sad that Cara keeps herself cooped up inside. Coming from me, that’s like the pot calling the kettle black. But perhaps because I’ve been a shut-in so long, I’m sensitive to it. She’s so different from how she was the first time I met her, at the beginning of the summer.”
“She’s still grieving.”
“I know. But even Flo thinks she should be getting out more. And she was a social worker before she retired. And . . .” Heather drew circles in the sand. “. . . I talked to my therapist about Cara.” Heather had maintained her weekly session with her therapist in Charlotte via phone over the summer.
“You did? What did she say?”
“We talked about the different phases of grief. After the first phase of mourning, one moves into a longer phase of intense psychological pain. Weeping. Guilt. Hopelessness, that sort of thing. When someone is grieving, it’s easy for them to let go of their health. The way Cara’s sleeping all the time, watching TV, not eating well, is not unusual.”
Heather couldn’t quite put her finger on why, but she felt a sense of responsibility and even protectiveness toward Cara. Maybe it was because Cara reminded Heather so much of herself after her mother’s death, or maybe it was just a woman witnessing another woman in excruciating pain. Whatever the reason, Heather wanted—no, needed—to help.
“So I’ve been thinking. We have to try to lure her outdoors.”
“Wait,” Bo said, holding up his palm. “An agoraphobe is going to lure Cara outdoors?”
“I know, right?” Heather said with a self-deprecating laugh. “That’s why I need your help.”
He raised a brow. “Oh?”
“I have a plan.”
“You can tell it to me over dinner,” he said, scrambling to his feet.
“Dinner?”
He held out his hand and with a firm tug pulled Heather up, then put his arms around her waist and gently pulled her closer. “Yes. Tonight I’m taking you somewhere special.”
Chapter Nineteen
THE EVENING ARRIVED slowly. For Heather, the day had felt as if she were driving through a long tunnel, sure that the end would never come. She’d dutifully sent off her first collection of sketches to her commissioning art director in the morning. Letting go of the carefully wrapped package had been an exhilarating moment of completion. She’d finished this portion of her deadline on schedule. She had stood at the counter and watched the clerk affix the tags and postage with pride and relief. Yet as soon as she’d stepped out of the shop door, she’d stood blinking in the heat of a July morning, steeped in quandary. What would she do now? She had to wait for the decision of the committee as to what shorebirds were approved before she moved forward. She’d become fixed in her routine, and abandoning her daily schedule was not something that worked well for someone like Heather.