Page 32

Then I hear it. Three soft knocks, from the other side.

The air goes out of me. I cross the kitchen and put my palm flat on the plaster. It's cool and faintly gritty with old paint.

I make a fist. Slow and heavy, I knock three times. Like a man reporting in.

There's a beat of silence. Then I hear her forehead hit the wall, a soft thump, and a breath that shakes all the way through.

I don't think. I'm out the door and across the porch before I know I'm moving. I knock on her door with my fist, hard enough to rattle it.

She opens it.

Chapter 7 — Hollis

By half past three I've gone through a whole tube of cadmium orange, which I haven't done since art school.

The canvas has been behind one couch or another since I was nineteen. Six feet by eight, stretched and primed for a version of me who was going to need it. I dragged it out at noon with my jaw set and shoved the easel across the floorboards hard enough to leave a gouge Mr. Alfred will find in the spring.

I'm standing on the kitchen step stool now, because the top third needs reaching. My shoulder is a hot bright wire from the elbow up. My face is a mess. I cried for the first hour. I painted for the rest. I wipe my cheek with the back of my forearm and leave a stripe of cobalt across it like war paint I didn't plan.

I'm painting a porch at night. A white porch, a swing hanging where the two halves meet, and the dark pressing in on three sides. A door standing a hand's width open with a lamp burning above it. Orange spilling out across the boards in a long wedge like something warm tipped over. I've loaded the brush so heavy that the light actually drips. I let it.

Under my feet, a hammer has been going for two hours. Tap. Tap. Tap. It's coming up through the floor, up from the basement. I'd like it noted that I have been very mature about it. I turned Ella up. Then I turned her off, because even furious, even with my heart in my teeth, I wanted to hear it.

A man is down there building something. I don't know what. It is driving me out of my mind. At twenty to four the hammer stops, and the silence is worse.

At twenty past four, someone knocks at the door. A brisk, firm triple rap that I know like my own pulse.

"It's open," I call, because I don't trust my voice.

Grandma Ruth comes in sideways with a pie in a dish towel and her purse over her elbow, in her good lavender coat. She stops two steps into the room. She takes in the easel and the floor and the paint on my face and my overalls, which are so thick with orange they could stand without me. Then she looks at the canvas. She doesn't say anything for what feels like a long time.

"Pants," she says finally. "Good."

"Grandma."

"I said wear pants." She sets the pie on the counter and takes her glasses off and wipes them on the dish towel. "I'm eighty-one years old and I've been wrong about two things in my life, and neither of them was this. Put the brush down, Hollie. Sit."

I put the brush down. I sit at the kitchen table. She cuts two slices of apple pie with the knife from the block, each one the size of a paperback. Slides one in front of me and doesn't let me say a word until I've taken a bite.

"What did he say?"

"He said..." It's hard to find the whole thing. "Work called. They moved up the date. He said, 'Nothing's holding me here.' To his boss. Through the wall." My throat closes. "Then he told me he was good at leaving and bad at staying, and that he'd be doing me a favor, and I told him not to decide for me, and he said, 'I'll be out by six.'"

"Mm. And what did you say?"

"I made him sandwiches."

Ruth's mouth twitches, then doesn't. "Hollie."

"I know."

"You made him sandwiches."

"I wanted it to be easy!" It comes out cracked and too loud. I put my hand over my eyes. "That's what I do. I make it easy. I'm so good at it. I made it so easy for Grant that he didn't even have to look sorry. And I told myself Monday was a clean edge, and I was fine, I was fine, and then he said it in that voice—"

"Which voice?"

"The one that doesn't have anyone in it."