The wall behind the stove. White cabinets turning the color of warm bread. She mixed the cadmium yellow with the white and a touch of the burnt sienna and put it on the canvas and it was right. It was the exact color of five-thirty in Bernie’s kitchen when the light climbed the wall and the day started to leave.
The fridge. A suggestion of it—the edge, the round black magnet, the paper underneath it. She didn’t paint the numbers. The reader of the painting would know there were numbers. The tally was there without being legible, the way a thing is present without being explained.
The flamingo cards. The box on the corner of the table. She painted the box closed—the cards inside, the game paused, the score ongoing.
The window. The lemon tree outside it, just a shape. The rosemary in the pot. The garden going dark.
And then Bernie.
She painted him in the kitchen chair. Not the recliner—the kitchen chair, the one across from hers. His hands on the table. Large hands, the knuckles prominent. His sleeves rolled to the forearm the way they always were. His shoulders—the specific set of them, the way he held himself at the table, upright without being rigid, steady without being stiff.
His face. She painted his face last because his face was the hardest part and the most important part and she wanted the kitchen built around him before she put him in it.
She mixed the colors. The light on his skin at five o’clock. The shadows under his jaw. The lines around his eyes that were deeper than they’d been ten years ago and that she’d memorized without trying. His mouth — not smiling, not frowning, just his mouth, the mouth that said things like “I would have stayed” and “it’s not the chicken” and “yes.”
His eyes. Looking at her. Looking at the place across the table where she sat.
She painted his eyes aimed at her chair.
She didn’t know how long she worked. The light through the studio window changed—from seven o’clock cool to eight o’clock warm to nine o’clock full. She didn’t notice. She was in the painting the way she used to be in paintings twenty years ago, thirty years ago, before the Shack took all her hours and the brushes went dry in the jar.
She stepped back.
The painting was not finished. It would need another session, maybe two the background needed depth, the light on the cabinets needed one more glaze, and his hands weren’t right yet. His hands would take time. Hands always took time.
But it was there. The kitchen. The table. The light. The man in the chair looking at the place where she sat.
She set the brush down and untied the smock and hung it on the hook and stood in her studio looking at the first painting she’d made in months, and it was Bernie, and it was his kitchen, and it was the light at five-thirty, and it was every Wednesday and Friday and Sunday she’d spent sitting across from him not knowing what she was looking at.
She knew now.
She left the studio and went to the kitchen and put the kettle on and stood at the counter while the water boiled. The house was quiet. The morning was warm. She had paint on her hands—cadmium yellow on her left thumb, burnt sienna under two fingernails—and she didn’t wash it off.
She made the tea and sat at her own kitchen table and drank it and looked at her hands and thought about Wednesday at three-fifteen, which was four days away, which was not very long at all.
EPILOGUE
It was early Saturday morning and the Shack in its rhythm.
Anna was at the grill, doing something with eggs that involved more wrist action than Stella thought eggs deserved. Tyler at the prep station, slicing tomatoes with the knife Lindsey had bought him for Christmas that he treated like a surgical instrument. Joey at the pass with his clipboard and a new pen—blue ink this week, which represented a change from the black ink of the previous six months that Joey had announced at a volume suggesting it was a policy shift and not a pen preference.
“Blue ink photographs better,” Joey said when Stella raised the camera. “I did research.”
“You researched ink colors?”
“I researched everything. That’s why the systems work.” He made a note on the clipboard. “Table four needs a bus. Also the pepper grinder on six is at forty percent. I can tell by the resistance.”
“Forty percent?”
“I calibrate on Mondays.”
Stella took the shot. Joey mid-calibration, clipboard in hand, the morning light from the front windows falling across his apron. She’d keep that one.
The dining room was half full with the Saturday breakfast crowd. Regulars in their spots—Mrs. Feldstein at table two with her crossword and her single cup of coffee that she made last ninety minutes. The couple from Irvine who came every other week and always ordered the same thing and always asked what was good as if they might order something different. They never did.
The booth was occupied.
Bernie sat with his tablet propped against the sugar dispenser and his coffee at the angle it always sat — handle at two o’clock, positioned at the precise spot on the table where whoever was refilling it could reach without leaning. He’d been doing this for as long as Stella had been photographing him, which was over a year now, and she’d stopped wondering if he knew he did it.
