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“You wanted to ask him yourself.”

That stops me. She keeps doing that. She tells me what she knows and leaves the rest where I can reach it myself. I did not know that mattered to me before, but it does.

“Okay.”

Laura’s shoulders loosen slightly, and she takes a sip of coffee. I look toward the dining table. “Paint.”

Her eyebrows rise. “You want to try it now?”

“Yes.”

“Have at it.”

She goes upstairs with another basket of laundry and leaves me alone with the kit. I carry it into the kitchen because there is more light on the table there. Janet showed me yesterday how it works. The picture is already printed on the canvas, mountains behind a lake with trees along the edge. Small spaces cover everything, each one marked with a number.

The paint pots have numbers too. I understand the system. Find the same number. Put that color there. Keep doing it until my canvas looks like the picture on the box. Easy.

I open a blue pot first. The paint interests me before I make the first mark. It gathers between the bristles instead of running off, and when I touch it to the canvas, the blue looks brighter than it did in the pot. A thin stroke leaves white showing through. A second pass makes the color deeper.

Better. I fill another blue section, then open yellow. I do not like it as much alone, but when I put green beside it, both colors change. The yellow looks brighter. The green looks deeper.

I like that. Red beside yellow works too, but red pushed into green smears into muddy brown. I stare at it, dissatisfied, then try yellow and blue and only make the brown worse. Finally I cover most of it with red. Some of the darkness still shows underneath, and the red looks stronger because of it.

That is better. Somewhere in the experimenting, I stop paying attention to the numbers. When I finally compare the canvas to the picture on the box, red is where blue belongs and green has wandered into the wrong spaces. The mountain is starting to look like the mountain, and I realize I do not want that at all.

Every color already has a place. Someone I do not know decided where the blue belongs, how much yellow I get, where the red begins and ends, and what the picture will become if I do everything the right way.

I like the paint. I do not like being told where to put it.

I drag red straight across the blue sky. It is the best thing I have done.

After that, the numbers stop mattering. The brush is too small for what I want, so I press harder until the bristles spread. Better.

Turning it sideways leaves a broader mark. Better again. Then I put my finger into the red. Paint settles into the fine spaces between the willow strands and drags across the canvas in a wide, broken streak. I do it again, pushing one color toward another without blending them completely.

That is what I want. Soon the mountain disappears beneath orange and red, and the trees are buried under dark blue. Some combinations work. Others turn muddy, and I cover them until I like what remains.

I do not know how long I have been sitting here. For once, I do not need to know what comes next. What I want is already beneath my hand.

By the time the orange is nearly gone, I already know two things. The paint pots are too small. So is the canvas.

I am scraping the last of the orange from the pot when I hear Laura coming downstairs. I have not thought about her for a long time. Then she walks into the kitchen, and my attention goes to her.

Her hair has come loose on one side. She is still wearing the soft gray pants.

Pretty. The word comes easily now.

Laura takes two more steps into the room and stops without saying anything. I scrape the brush once more along the bottom of the pot before I realize she is staring at the canvas.

She sets the folded towels on the counter and comes closer, careful not to touch the wet paint. Orange crosses dark blue. Red covers part of the muddy brown I hated. Yellow runs through green in a thick broken line, and my finger marks remain visible where the paint is heavier.

“Kell.”

I turn toward her. She looks over the canvas, then at the small picture on the box beside it.

“You changed the whole thing.”

“Yes.”