“Good to know,” Anna said, and filed it.
People lingered after, holding their canvases, taking photos with the ocean behind them, exchanging numbers. The woman with the rosé asked when the next one was. Anna said “next Wednesday” and the woman said “I’m bringing ten friends” and Anna believed her.
The patio emptied. Joey appeared briefly—he’d been “in the area”—and reorganized the paint station before Anna could ask. He saw Michael’s easel at the end of the row and looked at Anna and raised both eyebrows and said nothing and left. Sometimes Joey’s silence was louder than his commentary.
Michael’s easel was still standing. His canvas was still on it. Anna walked over and looked.
The ocean was three shades of the wrong blue. The sky had a yellow streak that didn’t exist in nature. The horizon line was ruler-straight, which was the one thing a horizon should never be. Every stroke was careful, measured, precise—Michael on canvas. He’d painted the way he did everything, and it showed.
But in the bottom left corner, almost hidden, he’d painted something small. Not the ocean, not the sky. A rectangle. Warm light in the windows. The Shack.
Anna stared at it. He’d picked up a brush for the first time in his life and painted the thing that mattered to him. Michael came back from carrying the last borrowed easels inside.
“You can throw it away. I know it’s not?—”
“You painted the Shack.”
He looked at the canvas. “The bottom corner. I don’t know why I?—”
“You painted the Shack with the lights on.” She took the canvas off the easel and held it up to look at it more closely. “I’m keeping this.”
“It’s not good, Anna.”
“You picked up a brush for the first time in your life and you painted a place that matters to you.” She looked at him. “That’s what art is.”
She carried it inside and leaned it against the wall behind the register where she could see it from the kitchen. When she came back to the patio, Michael was sitting at one of the tables. He’d pulled a small cooler from somewhere — under his easel, she guessed — and was opening it.
Inside: a container of salsa. Rosa’s salsa. Chips in a bag beside it.
Anna stopped in the doorway. “You brought food.”
“I brought salsa.” He set the container on the table and opened the chips. “I made it this afternoon. To celebrate.”
“How did you know we’d be celebrating?”
Michael looked at her. The string lights caught his face—half in shadow, half in warm gold. “Because I believe in you.”
Anna sat down across from him. “In the Shack.”
“In the Shack, yes.” He pushed the salsa toward her. “But I believe in you.”
The words sat on the table between them, next to the salsa and the chips and the cooler he’d packed that afternoon because he’d known—before the twenty-three people arrived, before the first canvas was filled, before anyone painted anything—that tonight was going to work. Because Anna was going to make it work. And he’d wanted to be there when she did.
She picked up a chip and scooped the salsa. Rosa’s recipe. The bright heat, the cilantro, the tomato that tasted like someone’s hands and someone’s kitchen and someone’s whole history.
“This is still the best thing in this building,” she said.
“The building has a lot of good things.”
“The salsa is better.”
They sat on the patio in the dark night and ate chips and salsa and didn’t talk about what the evening meant. The string lights hummed. The ocean moved beyond the railing. Two people at a table, sharing food, the way people have shared food since the beginning of everything.
“The women tonight,” Michael said, after a while. “Several of them mentioned wanting wine. And snacks.”
“I heard.”
“We could put your salsa and chips on the menu for the events. And if we had the liquor license?—”
