“Ozark would be a great name for a kid,” Henry said, and he laughed, but my stomach twisted a little. I knew he was just joking, but that was a joke you made with someone you were dating. And we were definitely not dating. Even if I hadn’t been married, he wasn’t my type, and I was . . . well, like my grandmother, there had never been suitors lined up around the block.
“I envy that. Knowing what you want to do and then just doing it. I had no idea. Got a degree in marketing, which I really had absolutely no interest in, and had no idea what to do with when I graduated. I ended up working for the development office at my high school, which I guess is a kind of marketing, but I didn’t like it much either. I would have been better off going to dental school.”
“You would have been better off going to art school.”
“Sure,” I said, disbelieving. My parents had convinced me, I guess, because when I thought about it now, I wasn’t sure I saw the point. What would I have done with an art degree? Although, to be fair, the only thing I was doing of any value was volunteering at the Stabler Museum, and my marketing degree wasn’t much help there.
We were getting closer to the band, and the street was getting more crowded and the noise level was rising. We had to raise our voices to be heard, Henry leaning his head close to mine.
“I mean it. You say you had no idea what you wanted to do, but you did. You wanted to paint. Just because it was unacceptable to your family doesn’t mean you didn’t know what you wanted.”
“Yeah, well. If it was so important to me I would have done it anyway. At least for fun. I haven’t painted in years.”
“I’m not sure that’s the case. You got a pretty strong message it wasn’t a good use of your time.”
There was another little twist in my gut when I heard him rising to my defense, because he was standing up for me when he didn’t know the entire story. I wasn’t telling him everything. I wasn’t telling him marrying Phillip had been the culmination of a hundred decisions, that it had required my putting away everything that had mattered to the person I really was in order to become the person I had always been told I should want to be, and one of the things I had sacrificed was painting. And I wasn’t telling him because it would have required admitting it myself, and spoiling the illusion I had that this moment here, this time in Magnolia with him and Sharon and my easel in my mother’s basement, was my life, that I had never been lonely or sad, had never married a man who criticized me for gaining weight instead of feeding me chocolate lava cake, who took me to parties and fundraisers I didn’t want to go to with people I didn’t care about instead of to street fairs that made me feel alive.
“Remember how Sharon said I was in a band with Kevin?”
“Yes!” This thought filled me with an inappropriately large sense of glee, and I clapped my hands together. “What kind of music? What instrument did you play?”
“Drums,” Henry said, slapping out a quick rhythm in the air. “And I wouldn’t call what we played music. It was mostly a lot of noise, but we categorized ourselves as hair metal.”
“Please tell me there are pictures of you with long hair.”
“You will never see them. I keep them locked up. Like the picture of Dorian Gray.”
“I don’t think that portrait was hidden out of eighties hair shame.”
“But don’t I look youthful?” He tossed his hair dramatically and I laughed out loud, surprised again at the sound of my own delight. “The point is I think about music sometimes, and how it was such a huge part of my existence, and how now I only think about it if I’m deciding what to play in the restaurant, or what to listen to on the way to work. And I don’t think, ‘That part of my life is over.’ I think, ‘That’s not as big a part of my life right now.’ So your painting, for a while, was ‘not right now,’ and now it’s time again.”
“Maybe,” I said. Maybe that was it—my life had only been on hold, waiting for me to pick it up again.
We began to walk again until we came to the other end of the street. Outside the Thai restaurant, Wanee’s children joyfully danced to the music. Next door was the knitting shop, and as advertised, I could see a group of women at the back of the store, sitting in a circle, talking and laughing, colorful suns of yarn in their laps. A group of people stood by the door, drinking wine and laughing, and a server with a tray of appetizers passed back and forth in front of the window.
Inside, it was hot and close, bodies pressed together looking at the art or just chatting in groups. Cassandra stopped by to give us a hug, and we looked at the art—wall hangings, quilted or woven, impossible combinations of texture and color. The fabric made the “do not touch” rule feel even harder, and my fingers itched when I looked at the quilted swirls, the feathery explosions of angora, the hidden glimmer of silvery thread. To keep my hands busy, I swiped more than my share of appetizers off the passing trays. My mouth was still full when Henry asked if I was ready to go. Tiny beads of sweat stood out at his hairline.