“You must be Stella,” Sam said. “Ever since Tyler’s voicemail I’ve been wanting to meet you. What a lovely surprise—another granddaughter.”
“That’s me.”
“He tried to call a few times, apparently, but I was in the studio, and I don’t bring my phone in there. The light is too good to interrupt with ringing.” She squeezed Stella’s arm. “But I’m so glad you came.”
Then Sam’s arm went around Bea’s shoulder and she was already turning them toward the exit. “Let’s go. The car’s in a spot I’m not entirely sure is legal.”
Stella picked up both bags and followed them to the car.
Sam drove a Subaru that had clearly been lived in. There were two empty travel mugs in the cup holders, a sketchbook on the back seat, three different pairs of sunglasses on the dashboard, and a sweater wadded up against the passenger door. The gas gauge sat just above the line. Bea got the front. Stella took the back with her camera bag in her lap. The windows were cracked and the desert air came through dry and warm and smelling like nothing she recognized—no salt, no ocean, just dust and heat and something faintly green.
The drive from Phoenix was over two hours. Sam talked.
She told them about the formations they were about to start seeing, and which ones had which names, and which ones she liked best. She told them about a restaurant in Sedona that did something extraordinary with prickly pear cactus that they had to try one night. She asked Bea about the flight. She told them about the time she’d driven this road in a rainstorm and pulledover to paint the clouds and a state trooper had knocked on her window to ask if she was okay.
She did not ask about Tyler. She did not ask about Anna. She did not ask about Margo. Or Meg.
Stella kept her camera in her lap and her eyes on the rocks. They started small and brown and then they got bigger and redder and at one point Sam pulled into a turn-out without warning and said, “You have to see this for one minute.”
The light was hitting the canyon walls in a way that made them look painted. Bea made a sound. Stella took a photograph.
“Worth two minutes off the drive,” Sam said, watching them watch.
“Worth a lot more than that,” Bea said.
“Plenty more where that came from. Come on.”
Sam’s place was at the end of a dirt road on the south side of town. Single-story, adobe, sand-colored, set into the slope so that the back faced Cathedral Rock and the front faced nothing—just the road and the chaparral. There were wind chimes on the porch and a stack of flattened moving boxes leaned against the side of the house. A rental—Stella could tell from the generic doormat and the lockbox still bolted to the railing.
Inside it smelled like sage and old books. The living room had a vaulted ceiling and a wall of windows that faced the rock. There were paintings all over the walls—Sam’s, hung as if they’d always been there, though the nail holes didn’t quite match the frames. Half-finished canvases were stacked face-in against the far wall. The bookshelves were full but the books looked like they’d been unpacked recently—spines facing out but not arranged, not settled in. Shelves of ceramic pottery—bowls and vases in earthtones, the kind of collection you build by buying one in every town you pass through.
Sam walked Bea through the living room with her arm around her shoulder, pointing at the rock through the windows, naming the formations. Stella came through the door behind them carrying both bags and set them in the hallway. Neither of them turned around.
“I’ve been here about four months,” Sam said, catching Stella looking at the bookshelves. “Before this it was Taos. Before that, a place outside Santa Fe that had a scorpion problem I wasn’t willing to negotiate with. I tend to move when the light changes.” She pointed down the hall. “Your room’s down the hall on the left. Drop your stuff, come eat. I meant to cook but the day got away from me, so we’re improvising.”
“I love her already,” Bea said in their room with the door closed.
Stella set her bag on the dresser and didn’t say anything.
Dinner was on the back patio. The rock changed color while they ate.
Sam had made tomato soup from a can—Campbell’s, the condensed kind, which she’d mixed with milk instead of water and heated in a pot that she’d clearly just bought because the price sticker was still on the handle. There was a pan of cornbread from a box that had come out flat and slightly raw in the middle.
“I think you’re supposed to put an egg in that,” Stella said, looking at it.
“It said egg was optional.”
“I don’t think optional means what you think it means.”
“It’s fine. It’s rustic.” Sam cut herself a piece and took a bite. “It’s terrible. Eat the edges, they’re better.”
Bea ate two bowls of the soup and three pieces of cornbread, including the middles, and told Sam it was wonderful. Stella ate the edges.
There was salad—bagged, the kind with the dressing packet—and a bowl of berries and sliced peaches from a farm stand Sam said she’d stopped at that morning, which was the only thing on the table that tasted like someone had remembered other people were coming. There was lemon water. There was wine for Sam.
“So, Bea, tell me about yourself,” Sam said, reaching for the bottle and leaning back in her chair. “I want to hear everything. What are you working on? What are you making? What’s keeping you up at night?”
Bea was already talking about her work, pulling a piece of cornbread apart. “I’m putting together a portfolio for my art show. My big end-of-year show at the Laguna Art Center. Fifty paintings and prints. June second.”
