CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
The house was quiet when they got home.
Michael had dropped them off. He’d carried the leftover Martinelli’s and the laminated card from Joey and the small bag of things Bea had brought home from the show — a program, a guest book, a business card from a woman who wanted to commission a painting for her living room. He’d set everything on the kitchen counter and kissed Anna on the forehead and said “I’ll call you tomorrow” and left, because Michael knew when the house needed to belong to just the two of them.
Bea went upstairs to change. Anna stood in the kitchen and listened to the water run and the closet door open and close and the sounds of her daughter moving through the rooms above her. Normal sounds. The sounds of a person who had just had the best and worst night of her life settling back into the house that held her.
Anna put the kettle on. Chamomile. No sugar. The blue mug.
She was pouring when Bea came back down in pajama pants and the oversized Florence sweatshirt she’d been wearing since she was fourteen. Her hair was down. Her face was washed. Shelooked seventeen in a way she hadn’t looked all evening — young and tired and done performing.
She sat at the kitchen table. Anna brought the mug and set it in front of her and sat down across from her with her own.
They drank their tea. The kitchen was quiet. Bea’s paintings on the wall — the Florence watercolors, the beach series, the small portrait of Margo. The same walls they’d been looking at for months. The same table where Bea had told her about Sedona two weeks ago.
“It was a good show,” Anna said.
“Yeah, it was. Thanks.”
“Mr. Reeves said summer exhibition.”
“Yeah. He mentioned it.”
“That’s a big deal, Bea.”
“I know.” Bea wrapped both hands around the mug. She was looking at the tea.
Anna waited. She’d learned over seventeen years that Bea came to things in her own time—circling, settling, finding the shape of what she wanted to say before she said it. Rushing her never worked. Waiting always did.
Bea took a sip of tea and set the mug down.
“She didn’t come,” Bea said.
“Oh, honey?—”
“She said twice. She said it twice, Mom.”
“I know.”
Bea’s hands were on the mug. Her thumbs moving back and forth on the ceramic, the small motion of someone holding something steady while everything else isn’t.
“I wasn’t surprised,” Bea said. “That’s the thing. I saw the empty chair and I wasn’t surprised. I was—I don’t know what I was. I thought I’d be surprised. I thought if she didn’t come I’d feel it like a shock and instead I just felt it like —”
“Like you already knew.”
“Yeah.” Bea’s voice went quiet. “Like I’d known since Sedona. Since the hike. Since she answered my question with a sentence she had in her pocket and then pointed at a rock.”
Anna set her mug down and put her hands on the table. Not reaching for Bea. Just there. Available.
“And I’m not angry,” Bea said. “I thought I would be angry and I’m not. I’m just —” She pressed her thumbs against the mug. “She remembered me sitting at the foot of her bed when I was six. She’s not a bad person, Mom.”
“No, she’s not.”
“She just doesn’t show up. She means to and she doesn’t and it’s not—it’s not about me. It’s about her. I know that. I’ve known that since I watched her turn away from Stella’s photographs and ask about my series instead.”
Anna’s throat tightened but she kept her face still.
“She’s going to keep not showing up,” Bea said. “And I’m going to keep being okay because I have—” Her voice cracked. She pressed her lips together and looked at the ceiling and blinked twice, fast. “Because I have you.”
