Chapter Seventeen
Lucy
Do not look at the internet today. I mean it. Go draw a fire station.
So of course I looked.
It took me eleven seconds to find. It was on one of those hospitality-industry gossip sites that runs photos of hotel lobbies next to rumors about who’s getting fired, and it had a banner ad for commercial laundry equipment across the top.
The headline sat under a picture of me I’d never seen before: me at the anniversary party in June, mid-laugh, holding a champagne glass, blurry at the edges, like somebody had cropped me out of a crowd.
STERLING FOUNDER’S ESTRANGED WIFE THREATENS HOTEL DEAL
I read it sitting on the edge of the daybed in the studio with my feet on the cold floor and Juniper’s chin on my knee.
It wasn’t long. Sources close to the company said that Lucy Sterling, who had reportedly moved out of the couple’s Lake Tahoe home after a public disagreement at their anniversary celebration, had retained counsel and was asserting ownership over elements of the Sterling aesthetic.
The same sources said the Sterling House deal with Summit Ridge Capital, valued at up to four hundred million dollars, was now on hold.
There was a line near the bottom: Mrs. Sterling, who has occasionally consulted on décor for the company, could not be reached for comment.
Nobody had tried to reach me. I checked. Nobody had called, emailed or knocked.
“Occasionally consulted on décor,” I said out loud. Juniper lifted her head. “On décor, Juni. Like I was the lady who brings the throw pillows.”
I scrolled down, because I am apparently a person who puts her hand on the stove twice.
Classic. Husband doesn’t worship her at a party so now she “designed” everything lol
Margot Kline has been the brains of that company since day one, everyone in the industry knows it
Bitter much?
She picked out throw pillows and now she wants a cut of a $400M deal. The audacity.
This is why you get a prenup, gentlemen.
I’ve stayed at Glenbrook, it’s gorgeous, and I highly doubt the wife did it
That one I read three times. I highly doubt the wife did it. Somewhere in America, a woman had slept in a room I drew, in a bed I placed under a window I angled for the sunrise, and she’d woken up rested and gone home and typed that.
Juniper whined and put a paw on my shin.
“I know,” I said. “I know, Juni. I’m getting off.”
I didn’t get off. I read all two hundred and six.
* * *
By noon I’d learned how quiet the lake could get.
There’s a group text of women I’d known for eight years, wives and board members and the lodge’s event people, called Glenbrook Girls, which I had never once named but had never once left.
It usually buzzed forty times a day: school pickups, gala seating, someone’s new kitchen.
Since the article ran, it had gone silent as a church.
Not a word. Not even the woman who used to text me photos of her dog in Halloween costumes.
At one-fifteen, an email arrived from the chair of the Glenbrook Foundation’s winter gala, a woman I’d painted a birthday card for in March. Lucy, given everything, we’ve decided to take the tablescapes in a different direction this year. We so appreciate all you’ve done in the past! Warmly.
I read it out loud to Juniper. “‘Take the tablescapes in a different direction.’ Which direction, do you think? Away from me?”
She thumped her tail.
“Warmly,” I said. “Warmly.”
Downstairs, Owen’s table saw started and stopped and started again. When it stopped for good, I heard him on the stairs, heavy, the way he climbs when he wants me to know he’s coming.
He stuck his head in. Sawdust in his eyebrows. “I saw it.”
“Everybody saw it.”
“Guy at the lumberyard showed it to me on his phone.” He came in and leaned against the doorframe. “I told him if he ever showed me something like that again, he could go buy his walnut in Sacramento.”
“You can’t threaten the lumberyard, Owen. You need the lumberyard.”
“I didn’t threaten it. I informed it.” He looked at me, at the laptop still open on the daybed, at my face. “You okay?”
“I’m fine.”
“You’ve said fine the way Mom says it when the dishwasher’s broken.”
“The dishwasher is broken,” I said. “Metaphorically. Go make something out of a tree.”
He didn’t go right away. He came over and put one big hand on the top of my head, the way he used to when he was fourteen and I was seventeen and crying over a boy, as if he could hold my skull together with his palm.
Then he went back down, and the saw started up again, and I sat very still and let it be loud.
At three, Cilla called.
“You looked,” she said.
“I looked.”
“How many comments?”
“Two hundred and six.”
“Lucy.” She sighed, and I heard her office chair creak in San Francisco. “Okay. Two things. First, I don’t know who leaked it, and neither do you, and we’re not going to guess out loud on the phone. Second, Summit’s counsel called me an hour after it went up.”
“That’s fast.”
“It’s very fast. They want to set a formal meeting in the city.
Before that, their lawyer floated something informally.
Very informally, off the record, the way they do when they want to see if you’ll bite.
” She paused. “A quiet licensing fee. You license the drawings to Sterling House for a number, you sign some paper, everyone goes home. No more articles. No more comments. It goes away.”
I looked at the laptop. At the frozen photo of me laughing with my glass, cut out of a crowd.
“How much?”
“They didn’t say. It’s a feeler. It’d be real money, though. More than you’ve ever been paid for anything.”
“I’ve never been paid for anything.”
“Then it’d be a lot more.”
I closed the laptop. It made a small, satisfying sound. “Take it.”
Silence on the line.
“Cilla. I mean it. Tell them yes. I’ll sign whatever. I want it to stop. I want to go to the grocery store without the checkout girl looking at me like she read something. I want to be able to go to the post office.”
“I’m not taking anything today.”
“It’s my decision.”
“It is. And you get to make it after you’ve slept, and eaten something that isn’t coffee, and read an actual offer instead of a feeling.” Her voice softened, which it almost never does. “Lucy. They leaked this so you’d feel exactly the way you feel right now. That’s what it’s for.”
“You just said we don’t know who leaked it.”
“We don’t,” she said. “I also know what it’s for.”
After we hung up, I opened my email and started a message to her anyway.
Tell them yes. I don’t care about the number.
I sat with my finger over the key. I didn’t press it.
I didn’t delete it, either. I left it there in drafts, glowing, like a porch light left on for somebody you aren’t sure you want to come home.
* * *
My mother came at five with a pot of white bean soup and a loaf of bread from the bakery on Donner Pass Road, and she didn’t mention the article, which was how I knew she’d read it twice.
“Eat,” she said, and put a bowl in front of me at the drafting table.
I ate. It was good soup. It was always good soup.
She sat on the stool by the north window in her gardening fleece with her reading glasses pushed up in her gray hair, and while I ate she started going through the flat file drawers the way she’d gone through my backpack in high school, without asking and without apologizing.
“Mom.”
“I’m looking. I’m allowed to look. I paid for half of that degree.”
She pulled out the top drawer. My old Hart & Pine work.
Before Rhys, before the lodges. A kitchen for a couple in Tahoe Donner.
A reading loft for a retired judge. A tiny cabin on stilts near the river that never got built because the owners got divorced.
She spread them across the table next to my bowl, one by one, smoothing the curled corners flat with the side of her hand, the way she used to smooth her students’ work on the classroom wall.
Then she reached for the Moleskines on the shelf. She took down #3. Then #9. Then #28. Then #30. She laid them open beside the old drawings in a long row, like she was dealing cards.
“Your stair,” she said, tapping one. “This lamp. Oh, I remember this window.”
“Mom. I’m eating.”
“Keep eating.”
“Did you read it?”
“Read what?” She didn’t look up. “I don’t read things. I’m retired.”
“Mom.”
“Twice,” she said. “And then I called the woman who writes that garbage and left her a message about the word occasionally. I was extremely polite. It was the most frightening message of her career. Eat your soup.”
She went quiet. She sat there with her glasses on now, leaning over the table in the last of the light, moving her finger from page to page.
From the old drawings to the early notebooks.
From the early notebooks to the later ones.
Back again. Once. Twice. I watched her face change, the art-teacher face, the one that used to find the thing in a kid’s drawing the kid didn’t know was there.
She put her fingertip on the bottom right corner of the reading-loft drawing from 2014. Two small letters there, in my old looping hand. Then on the corner of a page in #3. The same two letters. Then on #9.
Then on #28. Nothing. Then #30. Nothing. Just clean paper where my name used to go.
She looked up at me over her glasses.
“You used to sign the corner,” my mother said. “When did you stop?”