“Really? That would be nice. She and I took art together in high school. She was good, actually. I wonder if she still draws.”
“I doubt she has time, what with all her playing maidservant to Ashley Hathaway.”
“Don’t be mean,” I said mildly. I hadn’t forgotten I had been equally mean about Ellen and Ashley and all the rest of them, but I also hadn’t forgotten how difficult it was to be anything other than what everyone else expected you to be.
In the end, leaving hadn’t been as painful as I had feared, or as easy as I might have wished. Phillip and I hadn’t spoken since the night I had left—he communicated everything through his lawyer and I mostly agreed, because I wanted it to end, because I didn’t care about the money and there wasn’t anything else there that mattered to me, including him, and mostly what I thought about now was how sad it was I had ever agreed to live that way.
My mother had moved into her condo, and we had dinner together there once a week, because the one time she had been to the carriage house she had nearly broken into hives at the sight of the spiders and the dust. She was too much in the habit of criticizing and complaining to stop, so I had decided to get out of the habit of taking it personally. I could see my mother’s words were my grandmother’s legacy of disappointment, and the best I could do was to live in a way that would break the cycle. I hadn’t been to the Ladies Association meetings, but I had signed up to work at the Collegiate Women’s Society rummage sale, and the Garden Society fundraiser. Just because I didn’t want to feel constrained by that world didn’t mean I couldn’t see all the good they did, and I wanted to be a part of that. On my terms.
But I spent most of my time working at Kira’s store, where I was surrounded by the smell of wood and paint and the sharp, clean aroma of new paper, and I always tried extra hard to talk to the kids who came in, especially the teenagers, with their shaggy hair and sharp, defensive edges, their cash wadded up in their pockets, their fingertips dark with pencil lead. I wanted to grab their hands as they took their purchases and tell them, “Do this forever. If this makes you happy, do this forever. Do the thing that feeds your soul and don’t let anyone else tell you that you are broken because of it.”
I never did. Instead, I sent them out the door with fresh charcoal and new watercolor sets and I waved and said, “Come back soon,” and hoped it would be enough of a benediction to carry them through.
“Dinner!” Wanee called, bouncing the screen door open and stepping out onto the porch, carrying a tray laden with food. Her husband followed with a similar tray, and then Henry and Pete, and everyone found their seats as we unloaded the serving dishes onto the table until it was so full there was hardly room for our plates, and we shuffled drinks and silverware and sacrificed our own elbow room for the sake of the meal. We had met at The Kitchen so we could eat outside—although, feeling the damp blanket of air on my arms, I wondered why—but Wanee had cooked. There were plates of fish cakes, fried golden-brown, and pyramids of summer rolls, sprigs of green Thai basil peeking out from the edges of the rice paper. In front of me was a platter of salad, cucumbers with frilled edges, fat red tomato slices from Henry’s garden, translucent onion, sprinkled with crushed peanuts and marinating in a dressing that smelled both sharp and sweet. There were endive cups filled with chicken and carrots, and homemade noodles and curries, and Henry set pitchers of lemonade and ice water and sweet tea in the middle of the table, and the sight of so much plenty made me both overwhelmed and grateful.
The night before, Henry and I had gone to see Kevin’s band play at a club where the music was too loud and the beer was too bitter, but we had stayed out until the early morning anyway, and I had slept in and spent the afternoon painting until I had noticed the time and rushed over for dinner, the last to arrive. I was wearing a loose blue-and-white-checked shirt and cutoff jeans shorts and there was paint all over my bare legs, and no one seemed to care. Henry had kissed me on the cheek when I walked in, and said I looked beautiful, even though I had gained another ten pounds since I had moved back to Magnolia, and I smelled like linseed oil and newsprint.