“Whoever you want. Come on.”
Jess followed her to a narrow set of stairs at the end of the hall, dodging the stacked boxes. They thumped up to the top floor, entering a small room with a pitched ceiling. On one side was a double bed with a cedar chest at the foot; the other half of the room held a tilted table spread with drawings, an easel with a half-finished painting, and a table with jars of paints and brushes. Several canvases were stacked along one wall. A large rectangular window overlooked the backyard, and the ceiling on both sides of the pitch had skylights.
Dani swept her arm. “The guest room slash Dad’s studio slash storage room slash my old play room.” She opened a closet next to the bed and began to pull out boxes.
Jess stood in front of the easel. “This is your dad’s?”
The painting was soft and smudgy—watercolor, she guessed—depicting a grove of bare aspens in a field of bluish snow, a burnt brown forest in the background.
Dani said, “Yeah. He was an art major in college, and when they were in New York, he did a lot, but he basically stopped when we moved here. He started up again a couple weeks ago. After his mom died.”
“Your grandma died? I’m sorry.”
“Thanks. It’s okay. I didn’t know her. My dad never talked to her or saw her, so I didn’t really think of her as my grandmother. She was a famous painter.” She pointed at the canvases along the wall. “Those are hers. My dad went to pick them up in Colorado. She lived up there in a cabin. Frances Barnes. She’s totally in the encyclopedia. An American realist in the tradition of Andrew Wyeth and Edward Hopper.”
“Wow,” Jess said. She looked at the half-finished painting again. It made her think of day trips to Flagstaff, avoiding the expensive downhill slopes on the Peaks and instead renting cheap cross-country skis and taking the offbeat trails near Mormon Lake. Swishing through the trees, following her father’s tracks, her eye on his gray sweater ahead of her, checking behind her for her mother in her red wool cap. Stopping on the rustic benches to eat their home-packed picnics, fat ham sandwiches thick with mayo, apples cut in quarters and tart with lemon juice. How hungry she’d be, wolfing the sandwich, gasping between bites, as the bright sun warmed them at the picnic bench.
“Your dad’s a Realtor now?” Jess asked.
“Lately. He thought he’d teach a couple classes at the Syc when they first moved, but he didn’t have the right degree, so that didn’t work out, and then he thought about getting certified to teach high school, and then changed his mind, and then, I don’t know. He works on the house, does a lot of errands to help my mom. He sold a house last month, though.”
Jess said, “My dad is an insurance adjuster. The world’s most boring job.” Unless, of course, you fall in love with a coworker and you leave your family for a whole new life. She bit her lip and gazed at the painting, tilting her head. She wasn’t sure what she was trying to see. She didn’t think it was very good—nothing like the paintings in Ms. G’s class. It struck her as hazy, like a milky eye. “I like it,” she said.
Dani shrugged. “I guess. I don’t think he ever finishes anything. I don’t know if he runs out of time or gets bored or what. He always says art is about failure, but then my mom says art is work, persistence. That’s the only time I see them argue. Whatever. I’m going into science.”
Dani hauled out a large hardside suitcase and what looked like a fishing tackle box, plunking them both on the bed. Inside the tackle box were squished tubes, pencils, vials, brushes, and compacts. In the suitcase were scarves and hair adornments, a peacock’s spread of silks and sequined pins and sparkly barrettes.
“Voilà,” Dani said. She rifled through the box. “I’ll do you first. Who do you want to be?”
“I don’t know.”
Dani pursed her lips, squinting. “How about Cleopatra? Timely.” She opened a round compact that held a puff and white powder. “Close your eyes.” She leaned in and patted Jess’s forehead and cheeks and chin. “Okay, open.” She picked up a mascara wand. “Don’t blink,” she said. She widened her own eyes behind the glasses, her mouth pulled into an O.
“I won’t,” Jess said. She glanced at the dark painting on the easel. A line from the play looped in her head. Act 4, when Cleopatra is memorializing Antony. She said it aloud, inflecting as she remembered Ms. G had: “His legs bestrid the ocean: his rear’d arm / Crested the world.” She loved that word, crested. She never wanted to stop saying it.
Dani smiled. She said, “But, if there be, or ever were, one such / It’s past the size of dreaming.” She rested the side of her palm on Jess’s cheek and daubed at her lashes. “This is why we’re friends,” she said.
Jess smiled back. She held her eyes open as wide as she could.
She called home and asked if she could stay for dinner, and her mother shouted her approval through the line. She and Dani ate pizza and ice cream in their makeup and headgear, she as Cleopatra, Dani as a glittery-eyed Titania—Dani’s parents both got it on the first guess. Dani’s parents drank red wine and regaled them with stories about their years working in New York, Dani’s mother as a playwright and actor and Dani’s father as a painter before they moved to Sycamore for Dani’s mother’s job at the college. Dani rolled her eyes and said, “Here we go again, the great New York saga.” Jess smiled at her but leaned closer to the table. Really, Dani’s mother told her, we were waiters and cooks. Sycamore was hardly thrilling, but it was stable, she said, especially with a two-year-old in tow. Definitely not thrilling, Dani’s father said, laughing. Turned out he was a better Realtor than painter. Unlike my mother, he said. Cheers to my mother, he said, raising his glass, still laughing, but it sounded to Jess as if he laughed a little too hard, or maybe that was the wine, and Dani’s mother looked down at her lap.
Before Jess left to go home, she and Dani stood side by side in the guest bathroom with its plush pink towels and wiped their makeup off, laughing at their smeared eyes and cheeks, making faces in the mirror, filling the wastebasket with blackened tissues. Jess washed her face with soap in the shape of a starfish, scrubbing with a pink washcloth. Because it was late, Dani’s father loaded her bike in the trunk of the Squareback he was fixing up for Dani and drove her the quick few blocks home. The engine, a low thunder, vibrated in her chest.
“Thanks again, Mr. Newell,” she said as he pulled into the driveway.
“Adam,” he said. “Not a problem, Jess. Hang on, that door sticks.” He leaned across her, tugged on the handle, and gave the door a firm push. Then he got out and unloaded her bike from the trunk.
She took it from him, gripping its handlebars. “Thank you,” she said again, but she couldn’t bring herself to call him by his first name.
Under the porch light, he smiled and pointed at her face. “Missed a spot,” he said.