Chapter Twelve
Lucy
I was reaching for a pack of gum when I saw my great room.
It was the Tuesday after Labor Day, and the grocery on Donner Pass Road was full of people restocking after the long weekend: coolers, charcoal, a man buying nothing but eleven bags of ice.
I had a basket over my arm with a rotisserie chicken in it, two limes, a can of coffee and a twenty-pound bag of senior kibble for Juniper that was cutting off the circulation in my wrist. The line was long.
I was tired in the good way. I’d been at the fire station site since six, where the crew had finally finished hauling out the last of the burned slab, and there was still ash in the creases of my knuckles that no amount of soap would touch.
The magazine rack was at hip height, between the gum and the lip balm. People. A cooking magazine. A tabloid about a prince. And a glossy regional one with a thick spine and a matte cover, the kind that sits on the coffee tables of second homes in Martis Camp.
Alpine Living. September.
The photograph was of the great room at Glenbrook, taken from the gallery at dusk, the lamps just lit.
The masonry heater. The long oak beam over it that Owen and two of his guys had set with a crane and a lot of swearing.
The window seat along the lake wall with its cushions in the rust-colored wool I’d had woven in Pendleton, Oregon, because every sample in California had been two shades too pink.
And standing in front of the heater, arms folded, in a black turtleneck and a smile I recognized from ten years of board dinners, was Margot.
MARGOT KLINE: THE VISIONARY BEHIND STERLING’S LOOK
Below it, smaller: How one woman shaped the West’s most coveted lodges—and why she’s taking them to the city.
I stood there with the kibble cutting into my arm.
“Oh, that’s the lodge on the lake!” The woman behind me had leaned around my shoulder to see. She was maybe sixty, in a fleece vest with a golf-club logo. “We went there for our fortieth. Isn’t it just the most beautiful place you’ve ever been?”
I heard myself say, “It’s very beautiful.”
“And she did all of it.” She tapped the cover with one fingernail, right on Margot’s folded arms. “I read something about her online. Did every room herself. You’d never think it, would you? A businesswoman, and she’s got that eye.”
“You’d never think it,” I said.
“My daughter’s got a picture of that library taped to her refrigerator. She wants to redo her whole house like it.” She sighed happily. “Some people just have the gift, I guess.”
“I guess they do.”
“Next,” said the cashier.
I put the basket on the belt. The chicken, the limes, the coffee, the dog food. Then I reached back to the rack and took every copy of Alpine Living it had, which was four, and put them on the belt on top of the chicken.
The cashier was a teenager with a nose ring and a name tag with a smiley face on it where her name should have been. She scanned the first magazine, then the second, then looked at me.
“You want all four?”
“All four.”
“Are you in it or something?”
I looked down at Margot’s face, four times, sliding toward me on the belt.
“Apparently not,” I said.
* * *
I didn’t open them in the store. I didn’t open them in the parking lot, either, though I sat there long enough that the chicken fogged up the inside of its plastic dome.
I drove back to Owen’s with the magazines face down on the passenger seat, the way you’d drive home with a letter you already knew was bad news.
Owen was loading a cabinet carcass into his truck bed with one of his guys when I pulled in. He took one look at me and set down his end.
“Luce?”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re white as a sheet.” He came over and looked through the window at the passenger seat, at the stack, at the back cover, which was an ad for a watch. “What is that?”
“Nothing.”
“Lucy.”
I turned one over and handed it to him through the window.
He looked at it for a long time. I watched him find the heater, and the beam, and the window seat.
I watched him find Margot. I watched my little brother, who once built a dollhouse for our cousin with working drawers the size of postage stamps, go very still, the way he does right before he tells a client no.
“Is that a joke?” he said.
“Read the headline.”
“I read the headline.” He looked up. “She did the heater? I set that beam, Luce. I set it off your drawing. I’ve got the drawing in my flat file with your—”
“I know.”
“I’m going to call Rhys.”
“Don’t.” It came out harder than I meant. “Please don’t. Not yet. I haven’t even opened it.”
He handed it back through the window, very carefully, as if it might go off.
“You want me to come up?”
“No.”
“I could bring the good whiskey.”
“Owen.”
“Fine. Okay.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “But I’m right downstairs.”
“I know. That’s the whole point of you.” I gathered them all up. “I want you to take Juni for a walk. A long one. And then I want you to not ask me anything until tomorrow.”
He looked at me the way he did when we were kids and I’d told him I was fine after falling off the garage roof. Then he whistled for the dog.
* * *
I spread them out on the drafting table, all four, and opened the top one.
The piece ran eight pages. The first spread was the library at Glenbrook, shot from the doorway in the late afternoon, and the caption said: Kline’s signature north-light library, where guests linger for hours.
The next was the powder room off the great room, the hand-glazed green tile I’d driven to a kiln outside Grass Valley three times to get right.
Kline’s instinct for the unexpected. The bar.
The dock. The guest rooms with the window seats and the reading lamps on their brass arms.
Every photograph was of a room I had drawn. Every caption had her name in it.
There were quotes. Of course there were quotes.
“I’ve always believed a great room should feel like the breath before you exhale,” Kline says, running a hand along the oak beam.
“Luxury isn’t marble,” she says. “Luxury is the feeling of being known.”
And then, at the bottom of the fourth page, in a pull quote in huge italic type: “I wanted guests to feel they’d come home to a place they’d never been before.”
“I said that,” I said, out loud, to nobody.
I said it at the Glenbrook opening in 2018, standing on the dock with a glass of champagne, to a reporter from a Sacramento paper who smiled and nodded and didn’t write it down.
Margot had been standing two feet away. I remember because she laughed and said, That’s good, Lucy. You should write that down.
She had.
I turned the page with fingers that didn’t feel like mine.
COMING 2027: STERLING HOUSE. A full spread, the paper heavier here, the colors warmer. For the first time, Kline shares her design direction for Sterling Resorts’ highly anticipated urban brand, launching in San Francisco with private-equity partner Summit Ridge Capital.
“Sterling House is the lodge, translated for the city,” Kline explains. “I’ve been quietly sketching it for years. It’s the most personal work I’ve ever done.”
Three renderings. A library. A guest room. A bar with a curved banquette.
And I knew them.
“That’s mine,” I told the empty room. “That’s mine. That’s mine.”
I knew them the way you know your own face in a shop window before you know it’s a window.
The library was from Moleskine #22—the Glenbrook book, spring of 2018—a version of the library I’d drawn and thrown out because it was nearly all glass on the north wall, beautiful and freezing, the wrong room for a lake in January.
For a city, it was perfect. Somebody had noticed.
The guest room, with the bed in its alcove and the window seat built into the deep wall, was #27, March 2021, a room I’d drawn for a lodge Rhys never bought, on a night I couldn’t sleep.
The bar was #27 too. I remembered the banquette.
I remembered getting the curve wrong four times and right on the fifth.
They’d been cleaned up. Washed in gray, set on white, color added to the cushions. But the bones were mine. The proportions were mine. The way the light came in was mine, because I’d decided where the light came in.
We launch the brand in September. You’ll love it. It’s very… you.
I sat down on my stool. I think I sat down. I remember the stool being under me and I don’t remember getting there.
I pulled the desk lamp down on its arm, and I got my loupe out of the coffee can, the little brass magnifier I used to use for checking line weights, and I bent over the library the way I’d bend over a drawing I was about to sign.
In the left margin of the rendering, where the tall windows met the edge of the page, there was a mark. Faint. Gray. Somebody had cleaned up the drawing and missed it, or thought it was texture, or didn’t care. I put the loupe on it.
Two lines of pencil, and a little arrow pointing at the glass.
north light here
Lowercase. The h looped the way my mother taught me in second grade and nobody else in the world has ever made it. My hand. My note. To myself, eight years ago, alone at a kitchen table with a cold cup of tea, telling myself where the sun would be.
I put the loupe down.
She hadn’t stolen my ideas. She’d stolen my handwriting.