Chapter 31
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
The house was quiet when they got home.
Michael had dropped them off. He’d carried the leftover Martinelli’s and the laminated card from Joey and the small bag of things Bea had brought home from the show — a program, a guest book, a business card from a woman who wanted to commission a painting for her living room.
He’d set everything on the kitchen counter and kissed Anna on the forehead and said “I’ll call you tomorrow” and left, because Michael knew when the house needed to belong to just the two of them.
Bea went upstairs to change. Anna stood in the kitchen and listened to the water run and the closet door open and close and the sounds of her daughter moving through the rooms above her.
Normal sounds. The sounds of a person who had just had the best and worst night of her life settling back into the house that held her.
Anna put the kettle on. Chamomile. No sugar. The blue mug.
She was pouring when Bea came back down in pajama pants and the oversized Florence sweatshirt she’d been wearing since she was fourteen. Her hair was down. Her face was washed. She looked seventeen in a way she hadn’t looked all evening — young and tired and done performing.
She sat at the kitchen table. Anna brought the mug and set it in front of her and sat down across from her with her own.
They drank their tea. The kitchen was quiet. Bea’s paintings on the wall — the Florence watercolors, the beach series, the small portrait of Margo. The same walls they’d been looking at for months. The same table where Bea had told her about Sedona two weeks ago.
“It was a good show,” Anna said.
“Yeah, it was. Thanks.”
“Mr. Reeves said summer exhibition.”
“Yeah. He mentioned it.”
“That’s a big deal, Bea.”
“I know.” Bea wrapped both hands around the mug. She was looking at the tea.
Anna waited. She’d learned over seventeen years that Bea came to things in her own time—circling, settling, finding the shape of what she wanted to say before she said it. Rushing her never worked. Waiting always did.
Bea took a sip of tea and set the mug down.
“She didn’t come,” Bea said.
“Oh, honey—”
“She said twice. She said it twice, Mom.”
“I know.”
Bea’s hands were on the mug. Her thumbs moving back and forth on the ceramic, the small motion of someone holding something steady while everything else isn’t.
“I wasn’t surprised,” Bea said. “That’s the thing. I saw the empty chair and I wasn’t surprised. I was—I don’t know what I was. I thought I’d be surprised. I thought if she didn’t come I’d feel it like a shock and instead I just felt it like —”
“Like you already knew.”
“Yeah.” Bea’s voice went quiet. “Like I’d known since Sedona. Since the hike. Since she answered my question with a sentence she had in her pocket and then pointed at a rock.”
Anna set her mug down and put her hands on the table. Not reaching for Bea. Just there. Available.
“And I’m not angry,” Bea said. “I thought I would be angry and I’m not. I’m just —” She pressed her thumbs against the mug. “She remembered me sitting at the foot of her bed when I was six. She’s not a bad person, Mom.”
“No, she’s not.”
“She just doesn’t show up. She means to and she doesn’t and it’s not—it’s not about me. It’s about her. I know that. I’ve known that since I watched her turn away from Stella’s photographs and ask about my series instead.”
Anna’s throat tightened but she kept her face still.
“She’s going to keep not showing up,” Bea said. “And I’m going to keep being okay because I have—” Her voice cracked. She pressed her lips together and looked at the ceiling and blinked twice, fast. “Because I have you.”
Anna didn’t move.
“And Tyler and Meg and Stella and Margo and Joey and Michael and Luke and every single person who was in that room tonight.” Bea looked back at her mother. Her eyes were full. “You’re more than enough, Mom. You’re perfect. I have everything I could ever need.”
Anna’s hands were shaking on the table. She pressed them flat against the wood and held them there.
“Come here,” she said.
Bea got up from her chair and came around the table and Anna pulled her in and held her tight.
Her daughter’s face against her shoulder.
The Florence sweatshirt soft under her hands.
Bea was crying—not the dramatic kind, the quiet kind, the kind that comes when you’ve been holding something carefully all night and you finally set it down in the one place it’s safe to break.
Anna held her and didn’t say anything because there was nothing to say that was bigger than holding her daughter in a kitchen where they’d eaten a thousand dinners and had a thousand conversations and built a life that had nothing to do with a woman in Sedona who didn’t show up.
After a while Bea pulled back and wiped her face with the sleeve of the sweatshirt.
“Sorry,” she said.
“Don’t you dare apologize.”
“I got snot on your shirt.”
“I’ve had your snot on my shirts since you were born. It’s basically a feature at this point.”
Bea laughed—a laugh Anna didn’t expect but was grateful for.
Anna smoothed Bea’s hair back from her face. “You had the best show I’ve ever seen tonight. Margo said you did what she would have tried and did it better. Carmen Sandoval gave you her phone number. A woman wants to commission a painting for her living room.”
“That’s a lot.”
“That’s everything, Bea.” Anna held her daughter’s face in both hands. “That’s everything.”
Bea nodded. Wiped her eyes again. Picked up her tea and took a sip that was mostly for something to do with her hands.
“I’m going to bed,” she said.
“Okay.”
“Mom?”
“Yeah.”
“I put a reserved sign on a chair for her tonight. In the front row.” Bea looked at her tea. “Part of me thought she’d come. A tiny part. But I was pretty sure she wouldn’t.”
Anna didn’t say anything. She just looked at her daughter.
“Thank you for being at every single thing. Every recital and every show and every terrible middle school play. Every time.”
“Every time,” Anna said. “That’s the deal.”
Bea went upstairs. Anna listened to her footsteps in the hall and the bathroom door and the creak of the bed and then the quiet of a house where a seventeen-year-old was falling asleep after the biggest night of her life.
She washed both mugs. Dried them. Put them back in the cabinet—the blue one on the left, hers on the right.
She stood at the counter for a moment and pressed her hands flat against the wood and let the tears come.
Not many. Just the ones that had been sitting waiting all night—relief and pride and the ache of watching her daughter set a reserved sign on a chair for a woman who wasn’t coming and then stand up in front of a room full of people and shine anyway.
She wiped her eyes with the dish towel and hung it on the hook.
The hallway closet was on the way to her bedroom. She stopped at it. Opened the door and looked at the easel—folded, leaning against the wall behind the coats and the vacuum and a box of Bea’s old sketchbooks.
She didn’t pull it out. Not tonight.
But she looked at it for a long time before she closed the door and went to bed.