Chapter Five
Lucy
By Wednesday I knew the schedule of every saw in Owen’s shop by sound, and I still hadn’t made a single mark on the paper.
The table saw started at seven sharp, a flat roar that came up through the soles of my feet.
The planer went at nine and made the whole floor hum like a struck bell.
The router was for when he was in a mood, which was most days after lunch.
In between there was the radio, tuned to a country station out of Reno, and Owen singing exactly one line of every song.
I sat above all of it at the drafting table with a pencil in my hand.
The sheet was still pinned where I’d pinned it on Sunday. White. Clean. The north light moved across it every day from left to right like the hand on a slow clock, and every day I waited for the moment when something would come. A line. A corner. The edge of a window. Anything.
Nothing came.
“You alive up there?” Owen yelled up through the floor on Monday, over the planer.
“Define alive.”
“Moving around. Eating. Making noise.”
“One out of three.”
“Which one?”
“I’ll let you know.”
I tried the old tricks. I sharpened six pencils to needles with a razor blade, the way my first professor at Berkeley taught us.
I drew a horizon, just a horizon, a single line across the bottom third of the page, and looked at it for twenty minutes and erased it so hard the paper pilled.
I took Juniper for a walk along the river and told myself I’d come back and draw the river. I came back and drew nothing.
“It’s not you,” I told Juniper, who was lying in the one patch of sun on the floor with all four legs straight out like a table knocked over. “It’s me.”
She sighed through her nose. She’d heard that one before.
* * *
My mother came up the stairs on Tuesday at noon without knocking, which was her right, since she’d co-signed my first lease on this place and never let me forget it.
“Don’t get up,” she said. “I brought a casserole.”
“Mom, it’s ninety degrees.”
“Casseroles don’t know that.” She set it on the old door I used for a worktable. Green chile chicken, tin foil crimped tight, a dish towel folded over the top to keep it warm, as though it could possibly get cold. “Owen says you’ve been eating trail mix.”
“Owen’s a snitch.”
“Owen’s worried. He doesn’t know how to say it, so he says trail mix.
” She pulled off her sun hat. She’d cut her hair short again, silver and soft around her ears, and she had a smear of cadmium yellow on her wrist from whatever she was working on at home.
She looked around the room. She’d taught high-school art for thirty-one years, and she looks at a room the way other people read a letter.
“Well. You took the sheets off the table.”
“Just the table.”
“That’s a start.”
She came and stood behind me and looked at the paper. She didn’t say anything about it being blank. That was worse, somehow.
“When my kids got stuck,” she said, after a while, “I used to make them draw their own hand. The one they weren’t holding the pencil with. Nobody can say they don’t know what that looks like.”
“I tried that.”
“And?”
I held up my left hand. It was trembling, just slightly, just enough to see. I put it back in my lap.
My mother sat down on the bench against the wall, the one Owen had built me when I first opened, cedar with a curved back, and she patted the seat next to her.
I went and sat. She didn’t hug me. She just took my hand, the unhelpful one, and held it on her knee like it was something she’d found on a beach.
“He called me,” she said.
“Of course he did.”
“Twice. He wanted to know if you’d said anything.
I told him I didn’t know, which was true, and that he should call you, and he said he had, and I said, ‘Well, then, Rhys, I suppose that’s your answer.
’” She squeezed. “He sounded bewildered. That boy has always sounded a little bewildered when he isn’t selling something. ”
“Don’t feel sorry for him, Mom.”
“I don’t. I feel sorry for you. I just notice things. It’s a professional hazard.” She tipped her head back against the wall. “I saw the video.”
I closed my eyes.
“A woman at church showed me after the early service. On her phone. She thought I’d want to see my son-in-law being so generous.
” My mother’s voice didn’t change, but her hand got very tight.
“I told her the lanterns were Lucy’s idea, and so were the cards, and so was the dock, and so was the lodge.
She said, ‘Oh, I’m sure, Hazel.’ The way you’d say it to a child. ”
“Everybody says it like that.”
“Not everybody.” She let go of my hand and patted it twice. “Eat the casserole. Draw your hand. Call your mother. In that order.”
* * *
I shouldn’t have looked. I knew I shouldn’t have looked, the way you know you shouldn’t press a bruise to see if it still hurts.
Wednesday night, with the saws off and the shop dark below me and Juniper snoring on the bench, I looked.
The girl on the terrace wall had posted it.
Of course she had. Forty-one seconds: the lanterns coming on, the whole lawn saying oh, Rhys on the dock with the glass up.
His voice came out of my phone tinny and huge.
“Margot—to you. None of this exists without you.” Somebody had set it to a song.
Somebody else had cut it together with a clip from a movie about a woman who runs a newspaper.
By Wednesday it had its own hashtag, #SterlingTen, and four hundred thousand views, and the comments went on forever.
work wife goals honestly
the way she didn’t even look surprised
when your boss knows who REALLY runs the company
wait who’s the wife lol
the wife is fine she got a PARTY. margot got the CREDIT. know the difference
“throws a hell of a party” is the most husband sentence ever spoken
ok but the lanterns tho. whoever did those is a genius
I read that one four times.
“That was me,” I told Juniper. Out loud, in the dark, to a dog. “The lanterns. That was me.”
She thumped her tail once without opening her eyes. It was the most anyone had agreed with me all week.
Then I did the thing I shouldn’t have done after the thing I shouldn’t have done. I went to Margot’s page.
She’d posted Sunday morning. A photograph taken from the lawn at the exact second the lanterns lit, the lake gone violet, the dock glowing, and in the foreground Margot and Rhys with their glasses raised to each other, both laughing, his hand on her shoulder.
Behind them, soft and out of focus, you could see the great room windows.
My windows. The ones I’d spaced so the lake would sit in them like paintings.
Ten years of building something beautiful.
Eleven thousand likes. The top comment was from a hotel magazine I used to read in waiting rooms: The visionary at work. Can’t wait to see what’s next.
I set the phone face down on the blank paper and sat there until the glow went out.
* * *
Owen found me on the stairs the next morning at six forty-five, sitting on the ninth step, the creaky one, in his flannel shirt with my knees pulled up.
“You’re in my way,” he said.
“There’s room.”
He looked at the gap between me and the railing and edged past, sideways, holding his thermos over my head. At the bottom he unlocked the shop and hit the lights and then, instead of starting the saw, came back out and stood on the gravel looking up at me.
“You didn’t sleep.”
“I slept.”
“Your eyes look like a raccoon’s.”
“Thank you, Owen. That’s very supportive.”
“I’m not supportive. I’m a carpenter.” He unscrewed the thermos and drank from the lid. “Mom says you can’t draw.”
It came out of me all at once, like something that had been sitting at the top of a shelf too long and finally fell.
“Maybe I never could.” My voice cracked straight down the middle.
“Maybe that’s the thing. Everybody else seems so sure.
Four hundred thousand people watched him say it, Owen.
Margot builds it. Margot did the look. And I sat up there for four days with a pencil, and nothing, not one line, and I keep thinking, what if they’re right?
What if I just made it pretty? Picked the napkins.
Hung the lanterns. What if the rest of it was always the team, and I just—took it personally? ”
Owen didn’t say anything.
He looked at me for a long time, the way he looks at a board before he cuts it, checking for the flaw he knows is somewhere in the grain. Then he screwed the lid back on his thermos, set it on the fender of his truck, and went into the shop.
I heard a drawer. A heavy one, a steel flat file he’d bought at a school auction in 2017, sliding out on rails that needed oil. Then another. Then a third.
He came back out with his arms full.
Shop drawings. A stack of them, three inches thick, the big sheets folded in half and soft at the creases from years of being carried around a job site, pencil and ink and coffee rings and one with a boot print. He came up the stairs, all nine of them, and dumped them across my knees.
The great room stair rail. The library shelves with the rolling ladder.
The window seats. The bar back at Glenbrook with its hidden drawer for corkscrews.
The beds, headboards drawn at full scale.
Glenbrook, and the three lodges that came after it.
Four lodges. Ten years. And in the lower right corner of every single sheet, in red ink from a rubber stamp he’d had made at the stationery store on Donner Pass Road, crooked on some of them, smudged on others, the same four words.
PER L. HART SKETCH.
I turned them over one at a time. My hands were shaking again. Not from the same thing.
“You stamped every one.”
“Every one.” He sat down on the step below me with his back against the rail. “Contractors, architects, Rhys’s people, anybody who ever asked where a detail came from. That stamp’s the answer. Been the answer since the first board.”
“Owen.”
“The team.” He said it like the name of a vegetable he didn’t like. “I’ve met the team. The team calls me when a drawer sticks.”
I pressed the back of my wrist to my mouth.
My brother looked at me sideways from the step below, sawdust in his eyebrows, and his voice was rough the way it gets when he’s about to say more than he wants to.
“I built every one of those rooms, Luce. I built them from your drawings. You think I’d forget who drew it?”