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“Especially then.”

He looks at the canvas again. “Good.”

“Good?”

“I like that answer.”

He opens several tubes of paint.

For the next forty minutes, I make a halfhearted attempt to clean out my email inbox and get almost nowhere. Every few minutes, I realize I’ve stopped reading and started watching him instead.

The larger canvas changes the way he paints. He doesn’t stay in one place long enough to settle. He crouches beside one edge, stretches across another, gets up, circles, and comes back at the same patch from a different direction. The brush lasts perhaps ten minutes before he abandons it for the rubber wedge, dragging blue through orange before smearing white through both with the heel of his hand.

At some point I walk to the vending machines for water. Kell nods when I tell him where I’m going, but I doubt the information survives more than a few seconds. When I return, he takes the bottle I hand him, drinks half, sets it beside the paint, and disappears back into the canvas.

By then he has paint on his jeans, one forearm, and somehow his cheek.

None of it is on the grass. I consider that a personal victory.

People begin slowing as they pass. At first, it’s a couple on the walking path, then a woman pushing a stroller. Two boys on bicycles stop long enough that one nearly tips over because he’s forgotten to put his foot down.

Everyone notices Kell. Most recognize what he is immediately and keep moving. I hear “Wicker Man” twice. Someone raises a phone.

Kell keeps painting.

That’s what catches my attention.

At La Estrella, he noticed everyone who approached him. He answered the boy’s questions, agreed to the photograph, seemed almost amused by the attention. Today people can stare, whisper, photograph him, and none of it competes with whatever is happening between him and the canvas.

A little girl edges closer to the drop cloth while her father trails behind her.

“What are you painting?”

Kell moves the wedge through a band of yellow. “I don’t know yet.”

The girl accepts this without difficulty. Her father doesn’t.

“You don’t know what it’s going to be?”

“No.”

The wedge changes direction, turning the yellow into a sharp line through blue.

The little girl points. “I like that part.”

Kell stops.

For a moment he studies the place she means, then nods. “So do I.”

He paints around it.

She stays another minute before her father gets her moving again. I’m still sitting at the picnic table, my phone dark in my hand, when I realize I haven’t looked at the screen in several minutes.

This didn’t come from me.

I bought the paint. I drove the car. I’m sitting ten yards away watching him use supplies I paid for because he couldn’t buy them himself.

But this is his.