Chapter 16
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Sam was already on the phone when Bea came into the kitchen.
It was the third morning. Stella had gone for her walk at six-thirty—the text on Bea’s phone said back by ten, don’t eat all the cardamom rolls—and Sam was leaning against the counter in her cardigan with the phone pressed to her ear, talking to someone in the easy, familiar voice she used with people she’d known for a long time.
“Thursday’s perfect,” Sam said. “She’s been studying your glazes in reproductions and I think she might actually cry when she sees the real thing.
” She listened. Laughed. “I know. I’ll bring coffee.
The good kind, not the gas station kind.
” She hung up and turned to Bea, who was standing in the doorway with her hair uncombed and one sock on.
“That was Carmen Sandoval,” Sam said. “She poured a second mug of coffee and set it on the counter for Bea. “She said come by Thursday. She wants to meet you.”
“Thursday is tomorrow.”
Sam smiled. “She said she’d have the studio open.”
Bea steadied herself on the doorframe. Her hand went to her mouth and stayed there for a second, pressing against her lips, and her eyes filled before she could stop them. Her body had understood before she had.
She picked up the coffee and drank half of it black without noticing—no cream, no sugar, nothing she usually added—because tomorrow she was going to be in Carmen Sandoval’s studio.
Carmen’s studio was at the end of a gravel road on a mesa above town.
Sam drove them up in the Subaru—Bea in the front, Stella in the back with her bag.
The gas gauge sat where it always sat, just above the line.
Sam was telling Bea about the first time she’d seen Carmen’s red rock series—the one in the Santa Fe gallery, the one that made her pull the car over and go inside.
Bea was turned in her seat asking questions, and Sam was answering with her hands off the wheel more than Bea would have liked, describing the size of the canvases and the way the glazes caught the gallery light.
In the back, Stella had her camera in her lap and her eyes on the formations.
The road turned from pavement to gravel to dirt, and the canyon walls got closer and redder and taller until they were driving between them.
The studio was a converted adobe barn with high windows on the north side and the red rocks filling the view on every other side. Wind chimes hung on a hook by the door. A pair of boots sat on the step, covered in red dust.
When Bea got out of the car, Sam wrapped her arm around her and whooshed her toward the entrance. Carmen met them at the door. She was small, maybe sixty, with gray-streaked dark hair pulled back and paint on both hands that she didn’t apologize for. She hugged Sam—brief, no ceremony.
“And this must be Bea,” Carmen said, taking her hand. “Sam tells me you’re chasing light.”
“I’m trying,” Bea said.
“Good. Don’t stop trying.” Carmen squeezed her hand once and stepped back. “Come in.”
The studio smelled like linseed oil and turpentine and the dry warm air of the adobe itself, baked into the walls by decades of desert sun.
Sam grabbed Bea’s hand and led her inside, following Carmen. Bea glanced back once. Stella had stopped just inside the entrance, settling onto a bench by the door.
Then the far wall hit Bea and she forgot about everything else.
Three paintings—the red rocks, the canyon light.
But they weren’t landscapes the way other people painted landscapes.
Carmen was painting with glazes so thin the linen showed through underneath, layer after layer of color that looked like nothing from across the room and like everything when you got close.
She wasn’t painting the rocks. She was painting the light on them. The light itself.
Bea walked toward the far wall with Sam on one side and Carmen on the other and the room behind her fell away.
By the time she was three feet from the middle painting, the underglazes were coming through the upper ones, the linen visible in places, the surface catching the studio light and shifting depending on where she stood.
In reproductions this looked like color fields.
In person it was alive. It breathed. The reds weren’t red—they were six reds layered so thin they became something that didn’t have a name, something between rust and blood and the light outside the studio windows right now.
Bea’s fingers itched. She wanted to touch the surface, wanted to feel the layers under her hand, wanted to understand with her skin what her eyes were trying to tell her brain.
She stood in front of it and did not say anything for a long time.
“You see it,” Sam said.
“Yeah.”
“Took me about that long the first time too.”
“She’s painting light,” Bea said quietly. “How does she get the linen to do that?”
“Ask her,” Sam said. “She’ll tell you. Carmen’s generous that way.”
So, Bea asked. And Carmen set down the brush she’d been cleaning and came back to the wall and told her.
She showed Bea the glazes—how thin they were, how long each layer took to dry before the next went down.
She showed her the linen she used, unprimed, the weave still visible through the paint.
She showed her how she scraped back when it wasn’t right, taking off a week’s work with a palette knife and starting over because the painting needed what it needed and Carmen wasn’t going to argue with it.
Sam was right there with them—leaning in, asking Carmen about the pigment sourcing, comparing notes on palette knives, the two of them falling into the easy shorthand of painters who’d known each other for years.
The three of them at the far wall, deep in the layers and the light and the linen.
Bea could feel herself inside something she’d only ever read about—the way two real painters talked to each other. She didn’t want it to end.
Carmen let Bea touch a work in progress—a half-finished canyon piece leaning against the east wall, the surface tacky in places where the newest layer was still setting.
Bea put her fingers on the edge of the canvas and felt the linen through the paint and understood something she couldn’t have understood from a photograph.
After an hour Carmen walked them to the door. She put her hand on Bea’s shoulder—the paint-stained hand, the one she hadn’t washed.
“You have a good eye,” Carmen said. “Sam wasn’t exaggerating.”
“Thank you,” Bea said, and her voice did something embarrassing that she couldn’t control.
“Come back if you’re ever in Sedona. I mean that.”
Then Carmen looked past Bea and noticed Stella—still near the entrance, bag over her shoulder, quiet.
“Oh—hello. I’m sorry, I didn’t even see you there.” Carmen wiped her hand on her jeans and extended it. “I’m Carmen. Who are you?”
Bea waited a beat, assuming that Sam would introduce Stella, and felt a pang in her chest. When she realized that wasn’t going to happen, she jumped in.
“This is my cousin Stella,” Bea said. “She’s a brilliant photographer.”
Carmen shook Stella’s hand and smiled. “Wonderful. I’m sorry I didn’t come over sooner—I get tunnel vision when the glazes come out.”
“It’s okay,” Stella said. “The paintings are worth it.”
Sam put her arm around Bea’s shoulder as they walked out, pulling her close—and Bea couldn’t tell if Sam was proud of her or proud of herself for making this happen, and she didn’t want to think about that right now because the layers were still in her fingers and Carmen Sandoval had said she had a good eye.
Before they got to the car, Stella smiled and looked back at the barn. “Good visit?”
“Epic,” Bea said. Her voice was still doing the embarrassing thing.
“Nice.”
Sam let go of Bea’s shoulder and went around to the driver’s side. On the way back down the mesa, Bea sat in the front and listened to the gravel crunch under the tires and couldn’t talk for a few minutes.
Bea watched the canyon go past and thought about the pause at the door—the pause where Sam should have said and this is Stella—and felt the sharp thing in her chest again, quieter now but still there.
That night. The guest room. The sheets and the dark and the rock outside the window with the moon on it.
Stella pulled the covers up and stared at the ceiling. “Your grandmother is really something.”
“She’s your grandmother too,” Bea said.
Stella was quiet for a second. “Yeah. Technically.”
“What does that mean?”
“Nothing. She’s great.”
“She called Carmen early for me,” Bea said. “She just picked up the phone and called. Like it was nothing.”
“It wasn’t nothing. It was a big deal.”
“I know.”
“It was also very Sam.” Stella shifted in the bed. “She called Carmen for you the way she makes the ice cream. Big gesture. Spotlight on.”
“She’s interested in you too, Stella. She asked about your photos.”
“Bea, she didn’t even introduce me,” Stella said. “At the studio. An hour in that room and Sam never once said my name. Carmen noticed me on the way out—because Carmen’s a decent person. But Sam was right there. She heard Carmen ask who I was. And she didn’t say a word.”
“She probably just—it was exciting. Carmen was right there and—”
“You introduced me, Bea. You. Not her.”
The dark was quiet. The rock outside the window. The wind chimes on the porch barely moved.
“She asked me about my photos the first night,” Stella said. “For about thirty seconds. Then she asked about your series.”
“That’s not—”
“I’m not mad. I’m just telling you what happened.” Her voice was flat. Careful. “She lights up for you. She fades to black for me. And I don’t think it’s because she doesn’t like me. I think it’s because you paint.”
“What does that have to do with anything?” Bea asked.
The bed frame creaked as Stella turned on her side. “You paint. She paints. She can see herself in what you do. I don’t reflect her back to her. So I’m not interesting.”
Bea lay in the dark and felt the sharp thing in her chest get sharper.
“Stella—”
“I’m fine. I’m just saying what I see.”
Bea turned on her side and looked across the dark at Stella’s bed. She couldn’t see her face. Just the shape of her under the sheets.
“I’m sorry,” Bea said.
“Don’t be sorry. You didn’t do anything.”
“I didn’t notice either. At the studio. Not until the door.”
“I know.”
“I should have noticed.”
“Bea. It’s not your job to make your grandmother see me.” Stella’s voice softened. “But yeah. It would have been nice if she’d said my name.”
They were quiet for a long time. The wind chimes moved once and went still.
“She’s still something, though,” Bea said.
“Yeah,” Stella said. “She is.”
Bea closed her eyes. The layers were still behind her eyelids—the light, the linen showing through.
Carmen Sandoval had touched her shoulder with paint-stained hands and told her she had a good eye.
And when Carmen had finally noticed Stella at the door, Sam had been standing right there and said nothing.
Both things were true.