Chapter 16
Claire hadn’t held a paintbrush in twenty-seven years, and the first thing she did with one was drop it.
It slipped right out of her fingers and landed on the drop cloth with a loud, wet slap, leaving a streak of blue across the canvas of the woman standing next to her.
This was not the impression Claire had been hoping to make within the first ninety seconds of a painting class.
The woman, who was a retired dentist named Phyllis, had signed up because her therapist told her she needed a creative outlet. She looked at the blue streak on her canvas.
“Well, I was going to paint a sunset. I guess I’ll have a river now. I guess I can work with that.”
Claire apologized four times. Phyllis told her to stop apologizing and start painting, advice Claire needed in several areas of her life.
The class was at a studio in downtown Beaufort, a bright converted warehouse space with exposed brick and tall windows.
The instructor was a woman named Marianna, who wore paint-splattered overalls and talked about color the way most people speak about religion.
She had wiry, unruly brown hair with streaks of gray in it and looked like she’d probably been living in a commune at some point.
She had set up twelve easels in a loose semicircle, each with a blank canvas and a set of acrylics. There was also a jar of water and a collection of brushes in various sizes. The whole arrangement looked inviting and terrifying.
Most people wouldn’t think a painting class was a big adventure, but she’d chosen it because she’d been sketching since karaoke night, filling her notebook with waves, marshes, and the view from her porch at sunrise.
The sketching had awakened something buried so deep that she’d almost forgotten it was even there.
She used to paint in college, before Greg, before the kids, before a third-grade classroom and pantry organization had overtaken her life.
Before twenty-six years of making everything beautiful for everyone else but herself.
She used to stay in the art building at the College of Charleston until two o’clock in the morning, smelling of turpentine and paint.
And they weren’t that great, but they came from a place inside her that didn’t have any countdown or to-do list.
She stopped painting when it got practical, which was another way of saying she’d stopped painting when she got scared.
Scared that it wouldn’t lead anywhere, scared that she wasn’t good enough, scared that wanting something just for herself would come off as selfish, because the world had told Claire Morrison that a good woman was a useful woman, and painting was not really useful.
Painting was indulgent. It was the kind of thing you did before you had responsibilities. But once responsibilities arrived, painting went into a closet, and that closet got smaller and smaller until you forgot there was even a door.
Harper was at the easel to Claire’s left. She was looking at her brushes with an intensity as if she were evaluating all the proper tools for the job. She’d arranged them by size, of course. Nina was to Claire’s right, running her fingers over the canvas.
“Okay, everyone,” Marianna said, clapping to bring the room to attention.
She had the energy of someone who had drunk six espressos that morning.
“Today is not about technique. It’s about making something pretty.
It’s about making something honest. I just want you to paint what you feel, not what you see or what you think.
I want what’s actually happening inside of you right now, in this room, on this day. ”
“What if what I feel is just confused?” asked a man who looked like he had probably been dragged there by his wife.
“Then paint confused,” Marianna said. “Confused has a color. It might actually have several.”
Harper leaned toward Claire. “What color is confused? I think maybe I’m confused.”
“For you, probably the color of a spreadsheet that doesn’t balance.”
“Ooh, that’s red.”
“Confused is definitely red then.”
“Start there,” Marianna said, because she had heard them. “Start with whatever shows up first. You can always paint over it later.”
Claire picked up a brush, a new one, not the one she’d dropped. She dipped it in the blue, the color of the accidental river on Phyllis’s canvas, and touched it to the white surface.
The mark was small, a single curved line. Could have been a wave or a road or the beginning of something she hadn’t named yet.
And then she made another mark and another mark. The brush moved, and Claire’s brain suddenly shut up for the first time in a long time because painting was the one thing that had always done this for her. Silenced the inner organizer, the woman who counted to three.
Painting operated on a different frequency. And Claire had forgotten how much she needed that frequency.
Harper, of course, approached painting the same way she approached everything in her life: with immense strategy.
She looked at her canvas for a whole three minutes before even touching it.
Then she picked out two brushes, a medium and a fine, and laid out four colors as if she were planning a quarterly report.
Then she began to paint, and what emerged was architectural, sharp lines, geometric shapes, precise.
It looked like a blueprint for a building that hadn’t been built yet, and it was actually good.
Harper had an eye for structure, but it was also what Claire expected, because Harper’s painting looked like Harper, organized, impressive, and completely contained.
Until it wasn’t.
Marianna had been circling the room, stopping at each easel, offering her observations quietly. When she reached Harper, she stood there for a long moment, tilting her head.
“You’re thinking too much,” Marianna said.
“Well, I’m a thinker,” Harper said. “It’s what I do. It’s my primary function.”
“No, your primary function right now is to paint, not plan a painting. There’s a difference.” Marianna picked up a wide brush, dipped it in a warm orange color, and handed it to Harper. “Do something with this that you can’t take back.”
Harper stared at the brush, then at her canvas. Then at Marianna, who waited with patience.
Harper dragged the orange brush in a long, uncontrolled stroke across the center of her painting, right through all the geometric shapes. And somewhere in the middle of it, she made a sound that was either a gasp or a laugh.
“No,” Marianna said, “keep going.”
So Harper kept going. She added yellow and then red. She layered color over architecture until the sharp lines were visible underneath, but no longer the dominant part of the painting.
The painting was messy and imperfect, and it was probably the most interesting thing Harper had produced in a long time.
She stood in front of the painting with paint on her silk blouse that she had again worn to a painting class because she was Harper, and her expression was that of a woman who had just discovered something about herself that she didn’t quite understand.
“I ruined it,” she said.
“You started it,” Marianna said. “The ruining is where art begins.”
Claire looked at Harper’s painting and thought about Jordan’s workshop and the table he was building for her with reclaimed church wood.
Harper was a woman being slowly, carefully taken apart and reassembled by a man with patient hands and a spare key that he’d kept for four years.
The painting looked like what that probably felt like, structure giving way to warmth.
Nina painted a marsh scene, because of course she did.
She painted it from the angle of the kitchen window on Edisto at sunrise, the view that David had fallen in love with, the view that she saw every morning when she made her one cup of coffee.
She worked slowly, mixing the colors with the same patience she’d learned at Senora Morales’s stove.
She didn’t paint David, she didn’t paint the boots by the door, or any of the other artifacts of his presence.
She painted the view he loved in his honor.
The painting was basically of David without David, and it was beautiful in the way loss sometimes is.
Marianna stopped at Nina’s easel and didn’t say anything for a moment.
“Who taught you that? Who taught you to see light like that?” she said.
“My husband. He used to photograph this view almost every morning. He said the light was different every day and it was never wrong.”
“He was correct,” Marianna said. “The light is never wrong.”
Nina painted for two hours without stopping. She barely spoke. She didn’t even look at anyone else’s canvas. She just stood there in front of her easel and moved the brush, and the marsh appeared inch by inch.
Finally, she stepped back and looked at the whole thing, pressed her hand over her mouth, and stood still.
Claire watched her from one easel away and recognized that expression.
It was the same face Nina had made when she tasted the mole, the same face she’d made reading her letter at the grief retreat.
It was a woman encountering something she had made, something that had come from within her, and finding that the outside version was true.
“It really looks like home,” Nina said.
“It is home,” Claire said.
Claire’s painting was the most time-consuming, and she initially thought it made the least sense, but she loved it.
She began with a beautiful blue, and the waves transformed into something abstract - not water or any clear image - just layers of color: blue, green, and gold.
A deep rose hue, almost the same as her fridge napkin, blended into the colors without strict boundaries, and the shapes were loose.
If she tilted her head and squinted, she might see a woman, a porch overlooking water, or a doorway - but she might not see anything at all.
Claire didn’t care. This realization was profound.
She’d spent 27 years avoiding painting for fear it wouldn’t be good enough, yet now she stood before a messy, abstract canvas - something unlikely to be displayed in a gallery to impress anyone - but she didn’t care.
This painting was for herself. It was the first piece she’d created in years that existed purely because she wanted it to.
Marianna came to her easel last. She stood behind Claire, looking at the painting for a long time. Claire had been through this before in college, so she braced herself for the critique, for some suggestion about her composition or color theory.
“This is brave,” Marianna said.
Claire blinked. “It’s actually just a big mess.”
“It’s abstract, and it’s honest. It came from somewhere real inside of you, and that is not a mess. That’s called art.” Marianna tilted her head. “How long since you’ve painted?”
“About twenty-seven years.”
“Well, then, this is a homecoming. Welcome back.”
Claire looked at her canvas again. The dusty rose color was right there in the center, surrounded by blues and golds.
It looked like nothing and everything at the same time.
She stood there in front of it and felt something she hadn’t felt since all those years ago in the art building at the College of Charleston at two in the morning.
The pure joy of making something that didn’t need to justify its existence.
Oh, gosh, she was crying. Not the controlled tears she’d perfected for sad movies, but real tears that came when something locked opened up. She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, got paint on her face, and then just didn’t wipe it off.
“You know you have paint on your face,” Harper said.
“I know.”
“Well, are you gonna wipe it off?”
“No.”
Harper looked at her. She dipped her finger in the orange from her own canvas and drew a streak on her cheekbone. “There, now we match.”
Nina looked at both of them. She picked up her brush and loaded it with gold from her marsh sunrise and then painted a stripe across the bridge of her nose. “War paint,” she said.
Phyllis, the retired dentist, looked at the three of them from behind her accidental river canvas. “Y’all are my kind of people.”
The room started laughing, and Marianna shook her head and smiled.
Claire stood between her two best friends with blue all over her face and a painting on the easel that she was going to take home and hang on the wall of her guest room.
She realized it wasn’t a guest room at all anymore.
It was becoming hers, a room of her own, a place that she had claimed not as a refuge from her marriage, but as a declaration of herself, a place where her sketchbooks lived and her paintings would hang.
She would tell Greg about it tonight. She would say, “I want to keep the guest room as my studio.”
He would say, “Okay,” because Greg was learning to say okay to things he didn’t fully understand.
She would show him the painting, and he might get it, and he might not.
And either was fine.
They all cleaned up together, washed their brushes, and carefully carried their wet canvases to Claire’s car. They loaded the trunk, arranging the paintings so they wouldn’t touch.
“Your painting is touching my painting,” Harper said.
“They’re wet. They’re going to touch.”
“My painting doesn’t want to be touched.”
“Your painting is abstract chaos, Harper. It can handle contact,” Claire said.
Nina placed hers carefully in the back seat, propped up against the headrest like a passenger. “I’m going to give this to Elena,” she said.
“Really?” Claire asked, looking at her.
“It’s the view from the kitchen, the view David loved.
Elena’s never had a painting of it. She has photos, of course, but not a painting.
” Nina touched the window. “She’ll pretend she doesn’t like it.
She’ll say something about how the egrets look too thin, or the water is the wrong shade of silver, and then she’ll hang it in her kitchen and never take it down. ”
Claire thought about Elena, five feet of fury and love, hanging Nina’s painting in her kitchen next to the saints and the photos of David.
She thought about the thread that connected all of them.
Every act of love in this story passed through food or art, the mole, the index cards, the food, and now the painting.
All of those things, whether food or art, said the same: I made this with my hands, and it’s for you.
It carries the memory of everyone who made it before me.
“One more,” Claire said, looking at her friends across the car. “One more adventure.”
“Yeah, the big one,” Harper said.
“Skydiving,” Nina said.
They stood in the parking lot with paint on their faces, and the word skydiving hung in the air between them.
“Are we really ready for something like that?” Claire asked.
“Nope, not in the slightest,” Harper said.
“Yeah, absolutely not. I’m gonna say we are definitely not ready,” Nina said.
“Good,” Claire said. “That’s the whole point of all of this.”