Chapter 12 #3
The moment of levity hadn’t fixed everything.
The sedans still sat at the fire station, and the valley still held its breath.
But for a quarter of an hour the talk at Rose’s was about the town’s shared history instead of blame.
Hank ate his pie quietly and silently declared it a fine a start.
A broken bone didn’t heal all at once, after all.
It got splinted and held exactly where it belonged, then the body and time did the rest.
He paid for his pie and surreptitiously passed enough cash to Rose to cover Ruth’s lunch as well. He picked up his hat, and as he walked out, he nodded once, briefly, to Ruth. She smiled a little at him, and her chin dipped just enough for him to see and no one else to notice.
He drove over to Tessa’s farm that afternoon to pick up the other project he’d been working on with Dillon’s help. In the wood shop behind Tessa’s house, he’d been building a proper drawing desk.
It was made of oak to match the dining room floor, with a top that tilted at an adjustable angle.
It had brass clips mounted at the top and on both sides to hold a sheet of paper securely, a shallow drawer for pencils, and another one for storing blank paper or finished pieces.
Lastly, it had a lamp mounted on a swing arm so the morning sun wouldn’t be the only light a working artist could count on.
He’d known Presley had talent. It was impossible not to know that with all the funny cartoon doodles and tidbits of more serious sketches she drew on every scrap of paper she got her hands on.
He’d been finding them all over the house, digging them out of trash cans, and quietly collecting them in the big, flat box his latest pair of boots had come in.
He hadn’t known the rest of it until Sunny told him, offhand, while they did the dishes together one day after feeding all the kids lunch that an art gallery had asked to buy and hang several of her drawings.
Sunny told him how Presley had handed over three and flatly refused to part with a fourth one.
His heart had expanded in his chest until he thought it might explode when Sunny mentioned the drawing Presley wouldn’t sell at any price was a study of a man’s hands on a guitar, apparently drawn from the porch steps one evening when she’d made herself small in the dark and he didn’t know she was there.
His hands. The child had drawn his hands. And then she’d kept them back from the whole world because they were precious to her.
Hank had very carefully set down the pot he was scrubbing and gone out to sit a while in the aluminum chair while his pulse did things it had no business doing. That was when he decided to make Presley a proper drawing desk, but sized down for a not quite adult-sized artist.
He gave Presley the desk Saturday afternoon without ceremony because ceremony would have mortified them both.
He carried it into the dining-room corner and set it down, saying it seemed to him a working artist ought to have a proper work space.
He showed her the lamp switch on the left side and told her the bulb was a special kind that shone at the exact frequency of natural sunlight.
Presley walked around it twice without touching it, the way her mother circled a kindness hunting for the catch.
Then she slid open the top drawer running across its whole width and saw the rows of adjustable storage he’d filled with drawing pencils, charcoals, pastels, erasers, and smudgers.
She opened the drawer and lifted out the large, leather bound portfolio he’d mail ordered and had her initials engraved on the front of.
She ran her fingers over her initials with something akin to reverence.
Then she opened the notebook, started turning its clear, pocket protected pages, staring.
He’d carefully tucked in every single one of her doodles and sketches that he’d collected since she’d first come to his home.
She looked up at him with her mother’s eyes, except filled with wonder and joy her mother rarely allowed herself to show.
Beneath to the scrapbook was an empty picture frame Dillon had helped him get perfect and square.
Gesturing at the six inch wide, chest high shelf running all the way around the dining room, he said, “Your mom went to a lot of trouble to restore the dish rail in this room. It occurred to me it can hold more than just fancy plates. And since I don’t have any fancy plates to put on it, I was hoping you might be willing to display some of your art on it. ”
She stared at the rail. Then, without warning, she turned and raced from the room. She tore up the stairs to the second floor, and then to the third. There was a moment of silence, and then her tennis shoes came back down just as fast.
She had a drawing in her hands, and very carefully put it in the empty frame and slipped the piece of protective glass over it. She set it on the dish rail beside her desk and stepped back.
His breath caught.
It was the drawing of his hands. She’d brought it down from wherever she’d been keeping it safe.
Only part of the guitar was visible, the lower part of the neck and the sound hole.
His left hand wrapped around the neck, pressing strings against the frets in a chord, and his right hand plucked at the strings.
The picture was held in a frame those same hands had made, by a desk those same hands built, in a room in an entire house that the whole loud family had built back together.
He managed a nod of approval before retreating and mumbled something about letting Presley have the room to herself to try out the desk. The real reason he fled had more to do with not being ready to find out if a Steele could, in fact, cry where he would be seen.
That night, Hank walked through the newly restored rooms switching off lights and turning off lamps.
The house came along with him the way an old, settled horse would, moving easy, leaning into him a little.
He’d built his life around being the solid thing that held its ground while everything else flowed around him.
He’d never once recalled being steadied and held up by anything or anyone else in return. But he was finding out now, one room at a time. It was both better and more frightening than anything he’d ever imagined.
He stopped a moment in his office. Sunny had somehow managed to turn it back into a historically correct front parlor worthy of this grand house. And yet, she’d tucked in his examining table and work desk near the far wall of glass cabinets in a way that fit the space and didn’t feel out of place.
This room was fully a reflection of him, now. It contained an elegant sense of age and permanence that fit the house. This room belonged inside these walls. But the space was still comfortable and felt lived in. Solid. It spoke of a both a doctor and a family man occupying this space.
It was shocking how clearly Sunny saw him. And, it was a tribute to her talent that she’d so perfectly translated who he was into the furnishing, décor, and ambience of this room. It humbled him to know that this was how she saw him.
He left a small lamp glowing on one of the side tables near the front window for no reason other than it felt right to do so.
Perhaps it was an invitation for anyone in need of help to come in.
Or perhaps it was meant for one person. To light her way and guide her here any time she needed to sit in its gentle warmth with him.
He went up to bed in a house that was, like his heart, finally too full to echo.