It also made something else happen, lower and steadier—a pull, a current, the same thing I felt when I stood in front of a blank canvas and understood that it was about to stop being blank.
I thought:I could make a living at this. Not easily. Not quickly. Not without the savings and the studio and the two weeks of clear calendar and whatever came after them. But the gallery owner had said representation, not charity. She had said show, not favor. She was a businesswoman and she had seen the work and she had called it the real thing. I had spent five years pretending I was only painting for myself, which was partially true and also a lie I told so I didn't have to risk being wrong about what it was worth.
I was so tired of the lies I told to keep things safe.
I looked down at the sketchbook.
I had drawn Charleston.
A specific corner of it—East Bay Street, the angle of it just north of Liquid Courage. The live oak that threw its arms across the width of the lane, the iron gate of the building beside it with the pattern I'd never consciously memorized but apparently had. And in the foreground, two figures on the sidewalk.
One of them was unmistakably large. Broad-shouldered, hands in pockets, that quality of stillness even in charcoal lines on paper.
The other was me. Or close enough to me that there was no pretending otherwise.
We were not touching in the drawing. We were standing beside each other looking at something I had left off the page—something ahead of both of us, something the composition suggested without showing. His shoulder angled toward hers. Her face turned up slightly, three-quarters profile. A distance between them of about six inches that read, somehow, as smaller than six inches.
I looked at it for a long time.
I had drawn this without looking. Without deciding. My hand had gone and this was where it had arrived, which meant something, because my hand knew things my brain took longer to process.
Nobody else, I had said, in the dark. And meant it.
I had known Brock for one day. One extraordinary, unplanned, completely structureless day that had begun with me running out of my own wedding and ended with his hand in my hair in the dark of a studio. That was not a relationship. That was not a foundation. That was the kind of thing you made sense of slowly, carefully, with your eyes open—not the kind you built a future on before the weekend was over.
And yet.
I traced the outline of the larger figure in the drawing. The jaw, even in the rough lines of charcoal. The set of the shoulders. The precise quality of his presence, which, apparently, my hand could reproduce without reference.
I had been drawing alone for five years.
I had never drawn another person into my work before.
The pelican on the piling took off suddenly, wings broad and unhurried, dropping out over the water and catching a current and riding it south. I watched it go until it was a dark shape against the light and then nothing at all.
I turned to a fresh page.
This time, I drew the studio. The canvases against the walls, the hot plate, the window with the city behind it. The sofa.
I drew it empty. Just the space. Just the room that was mine.
Then I drew, very small, in the corner near the door—a pair of boots on the floor. Large. Facing inward.
As if they belonged there.
As if whoever had left them planned to come back.
I closed the sketchbook.
I sat on the bench with the Atlantic moving below the pier and the March sun rising over the dunes and thought about a phone call I needed to make to a gallery owner, and about a man who was somewhere in this city right now dealing with something I didn't have the full shape of yet, and about the word darlin' said in a Texas drawl in the dark of a room that smelled like turpentine and the sea.
I had two weeks.
I had a car and a studio and savings and a sketchbook full of things my hand knew before my brain caught up.
I had—for the first time in my life—no plan. No structure. No map of the expected.
I had just this: the pier and the ocean and the light, and somewhere across the city a man who had saidI'll be backlikehe was informing me of a fact rather than making a wish, and the gallery owner's number still in my call history.
