Chapter 9 #2
“Good. Don’t stop her.” Susan Vance studied the drawing a moment longer.
“I’d like to show this piece. My art gallery does a youth wall in the fall, and I’d like to buy this one outright for it.
An actual sale, the way I’d buy from any artist whose work I mean to hang.
I believe in treating artists of any age with the same respect for their work.
” She glanced sidelong at Sunny for the first time. “If her mother is agreeable, that is.”
“Her mother is agreeable,” Sunny managed.
“Tell her to come talk to me after the winners of the art contest are announced.”
She found Presley twenty minutes later by the lemonade stand. She told her without making a big deal of it that an art gallery owner wanted to buy her drawing of the heron on the lake and hang it in her gallery because it was good. Really good. It was real art.
Presley didn’t cry because Presley never cried where it could be seen. She’d inherited that from her mom, and Sunny was sorry for it every day. But she swallowed hard and nodded too fast before she finally broke into a smile.
“She can buy it, and I’ll draw another one for my room,” Presley said with the flat certainty of an artist. Sunny laughed and pulled her in for a hug. “I’m so proud of you. And not just because you’re such a talented artist.”
And for once her daughter let herself be hugged in public.
The country music concert started at two o’clock on a tall temporary stage built at one side of the town square.
Makayla had been asked to be the opening act for a major country band that was on a summer tour of state fairs and local events.
She’d been performing with a local bluegrass band made up of four gray-haired men, and they took their places on stage first.
Sunny understood belatedly why the WoWS had set up their chairs where they had, for they had an excellent and unobstructed view of the stage from the side. They also weren’t directly in the blast zone of the big speakers pointing out at the main crowd.
Makayla was eleven and built like a willow switch. She walked out on stage in pink cowboy boots, tucked her fiddle under her chin, and proceeded to play a reel so fast and clean that an old man in the second row took off his hat as though something holy were happening.
There was already a good-sized crowd seated on blankets, waiting for the main act, but by the end of Makayla’s first song, just about everybody else at the Founder’s Day event had crowded into the square as well. They clapped along, whooping, and whistling as Makayla fiddled the house down.
Behind the stage, the members of the country band stopped preparations for their show and moved around the side of the stage close to the WoWS to watch the phenom up on stage. Even they looked impressed.
The crowd went wild when the set with Makayla ended.
The main act jogged up on stage while the crowd shouted for an encore and asked Makayla and her band if they’d like to do a song with them.
The country act had a fiddler of its own, and he stepped forward to play beside Makayla.
They played a classic song about dueling fiddles, and Makayla grinned cheekily as the two of them took turns trying to outplay each other.
She might be eleven, but she held her own against a seasoned music industry pro.
The crowd went even wilder as they realized she was matching the pro note for note.
When the song ended, Makayla waved to the crowd and trotted down the stage stairs into Tessa and Dillon’s hug, along with that of an elderly man Sunny didn’t recognize. Must be Makayla’s grandpa.
Sunny watched the four of them with a tiny twinge of envy. She and her kids were that tight a family unit too. But she missed having an adult partner like that to share it with. She missed having family around her.
Winston’s mother passed away not long after her son, but Sunny was fairly sure she died of embarrassment rather than a broken heart.
Her own family had wanted nothing to do with her or the kids in the aftermath of the scandal.
They’d said they were afraid she would negatively impact their business reputations, which told her everything she needed to know about where she really stood with them.
The rest of the concert was fun, and thankfully, Chloe slept through it. She’d shot right past exhausted to fully off the cliff right about when Makayla finished her set.
The pie judging came next, and Sunny was startled at the big deal made over it.
Although, she supposed this town wasn’t named after pie for nothing.
The six finalists were brought up on the main stage and hundreds of people watched eagerly as the judges went down the line slowly, examining and tasting each pie.
Grace O’Donnell’s blackberry twisted-lattice pie decorated with artistic pastry leaves and berries took first by a margin the announcer described as “frankly rude.” Reno carried his fiancée around piggyback afterward while she held the blue ribbon overhead like a prizefighter.
And soft, sweet, fragile-looking Grace, laughed the entire way.
Sunny stood at the edge of all of it with Chloe asleep on her shoulder and let it move through her.
She knew how to react to threats. But she had no response for all for this. It was an afternoon that simply kept being good. It handed her one true thing after another and didn’t present a bill at the end.
“You’re doing it again,” Hank said, beside her.
She hadn’t heard him come up. He had two paper cups of lemonade.
He set them down, took Chloe from her, laid her down on a blanket in the shade.
Then he handed her the cold cup, and she took it.
Somewhere in the back of her mind she noted, against her will, that she was accepting things he handed her without even thinking about it first.
“I’m doing what?” she asked him.
“Standing at the edge, keeping watch.” He said it without weight, looking out at the crowd the same way she had been.
“I do it too. Occupational hazard. I’m so used to being the one who spots serious injuries and reacts before the person even realizes they’re hurt that I forget I’m allowed to be in the photo. ”
Off to her right, she spotted Madison and Presley.
They had Lily up on a hay bale and were teaching her a clapping game of some kind with enormous solemnity.
Just past them, the twins had located mud.
Makayla was signing a little girl’s program with the gravity of Paganini.
Jack stood watch over the entire operation with his hands in his pockets, bored, yet vigilant.
“They think you and I are an item,” Sunny said.
She’d caught the looks all afternoon. Ruth Sanger’s friend at the jam booth, the way two women had gone quiet and pleasant when she and Hank stood near the lemonade together.
“The town. They’ve decided we’re a . . .
” She didn’t finish it. She didn’t have to.
“I know,” Hank said.
“Does it bother you?”
He was quiet a moment. Up on the stage, somebody’s grandfather was murdering a Willie Nelson song and the afternoon light outlined everything around them in brightness.
“It bothers me that it’s not their business,” he said finally. “It doesn’t bother me the way you mean.”
She stood there with her sleeping daughter at her feet and her older daughter’s whole identity changed by one stranger’s kindness, and she let his answer stand without having to take it apart and look for hidden meanings.
She was living this afternoon in ink, not pencil, with no eraser anywhere near at hand. And for once she wasn’t panicked by that.
They motored back across the lake at dusk, the boat slow and quiet with sun-pinked and spent children.
Chloe slept the whole crossing. Even the twins crashed as they finally, blessedly, ran out of steam.
Presley sat in the bow with the trophy for winning best in show on her knees, and every so often she looked down at it to confirm it was still there.
Madison sat beside Hank with her head tipped back to find the first stars. Somewhere in the dark middle of the water she said to nobody, “That was a good day.”
Sunny had spent three years learning to hold things loosely: her housing, jobs, furniture, friends, because they couldn’t be ripped out of her hands hard enough to hurt. She’d gotten good at it. She’d thought she’d be good at it forever.
She sat in the stern with the wake spreading out silver behind them, and she understood with clarity she usually saved for account books, that sometime in the last three weeks she’d quit holding on loosely.
She’d decided to keep this place. This life.
It might be a salvaged thing and scarred, but it was too good and solid to let go of.
The odd thing was she hadn’t noticed herself making the choice.
The dock drew near as darkness fell. Chloe didn’t wake even when Hank lifted her and climbed out of the boat.
Sunny walked beside Hank up the hill toward the lit windows of a town that had, without asking her permission, started to feel like the bedrock under her feet instead of one more floor that might give way.