Chapter 26
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Bea had been looking forward to the art festival since before it opened, and she was not going to let the two lumps she’d brought with her ruin it.
That was how she’d started thinking of them by the second hour—the lumps—because that was what they were being.
She’d planned the whole day. Down early before the heat got mean, park by the good lot her mother always used, work the booths in order, top to bottom, so you didn’t miss anything and didn’t double back.
She had cash in her back pocket for the ceramics woman she visited every year and a mental list of the mediums she wanted to look at up close before she started at CalArts in the fall, because you could look at art online all you wanted but you couldn’t see how thick somebody laid the paint on until you were standing in front of it with your nose eight inches away.
Bea liked to get her nose eight inches away, and nobody stopped you here. That was the whole point of the place.
The festival smelled like kettle corn and hot canvas and the eucalyptus that hung over the grounds, and everywhere Bea looked somebody had made something and was standing next to it hoping you’d like it, and that was her favorite sight in the world.
She loved them. She loved every booth. She stopped at a man doing plein-air oils of the coves and got her nose in close and he didn’t mind, and she came away happy, and turned around to say something about the palette knife to Stella—
—and Stella wasn’t there. Neither of them was.
They were twenty feet back, in the shade by a jewelry booth, not looking at the jewelry.
Joey was reading the little card that listed the prices, all the way down, like a menu he was going to be quizzed on.
Stella had her hands jammed in her pockets and was looking at the grounds the way you look at a room you’re waiting to leave.
“You have to actually come into the booths,” Bea said, walking back to them. “That’s the flow of a festival. You go in.”
“We’re coming,” Stella said, and didn’t move.
Bea let it go. It was too nice a day to manage other people’s feet.
They worked down the rows, or Bea did, and the lumps trailed.
She noticed things because she couldn’t help noticing things—that was her whole deal, she noticed—and what she noticed was that Stella hadn’t taken a single picture.
Stella, who photographed the inside of the refrigerator if the light was doing something interesting.
They were standing in the most photographable place in the entire county, beautiful light and old eucalyptus and a thousand handmade things, and Stella’s hands were empty and stayed empty.
“Where’s your camera?” Bea asked.
“Left it home.”
“You never leave it home.”
“I left it home today.” Stella said it flat, end of sentence, and Bea looked at her a second and decided not to poke it, because Stella had a look on her face that meant the poking wouldn’t be fun for anybody.
They got ice cream. That helped for about four minutes—everything helped Joey for about four minutes, you could watch the relief arrive and then watch it wear off—and then his was melting faster than he was dealing with it and running over his knuckles and he kept turning the cone a precise quarter-turn to manage the drip, engineering it, and not eating it, and Bea wanted to scream.
Instead she found her ceramics woman, who remembered her—the best thing that had happened all summer—and they talked glazes, and Bea bought a small bowl the color of the inside of a shell and had it wrapped, and when she turned around this time she was ready for the lumps to be lumping and they didn’t disappoint.
Then a woman near the pottery booth said, “Oh—you’re the Beach Shack kids.”
She was maybe sixty, sun hat, a tote from a different festival.
“My neighbor brought me one of your date loaves last week,” the woman said. “I finished the whole thing myself over two days, didn’t tell my husband. It was wonderful.” She tilted her head. “Is that a family recipe? Yours?”
“Not ours, exactly,” she said, and there was a beat where Bea could see her deciding how much to say, and deciding on all of it, because Stella never could help herself once she started.
“It was a woman named Ruth’s grandmother’s.
People started bringing us their own after that—recipe cards, family ones, the ones that only exist in somebody’s handwriting.
We’ve got a whole wall of them now. Names and everything. ”
“That’s the loveliest thing I’ve ever heard.
” The woman had a hand at her collarbone.
“My mother made pizzelle. I’ve still got her iron in a cupboard I never open, and the recipe’s on the back of an envelope in her own hand—the only thing I have in her writing, actually, now that I think of it.
” She looked between them, hopeful in a way that hadn’t been there thirty seconds ago.
“Do you take them still? At the counter?”
And Bea watched the strangest thing happen to both of their faces at once. A kind of flinch. Stella got there first.
“We’re not—” Stella started, and stopped, and started over, gentler, which somehow made it worse. “We’re kind of scaled back right now. On the extra stuff. It’s really just the regular menu for a while.”
“Oh.” The woman’s smile faltered and reset. “Of course. Well. It was lovely, the loaf.” And she moved off toward the pottery, and Bea did not understand what she had just seen, only that she’d seen it—two people saying no to a nice woman’s dead mother’s recipe like it cost them a tooth.
“That was weird,” Bea said. “You love that stuff. You’d normally have her whole family history and the recipe photographed before she got the sentence out.”
“We’re just not doing it right now,” Joey said.
“Doing what? Being nice to a lady?”
“Drop it, Bea.” Stella said it low.
They ran into Tyler near the photography pavilion, which Bea should have expected, because Tyler shot the festival every year and had a lanyard and everything, two cameras crossed over his chest, taking the eucalyptus very seriously. He lit up when he saw them.
“There they are.” He hugged Bea, one-armed, camera-conscious. “You buying up the whole festival?”
“One bowl. I have discipline.” Bea held up the wrapped thing.
“That’s a lie, but okay.” He turned to Stella, and Bea saw him clock it in about half the time it had taken her—the empty hands—because Tyler noticed the same things Bea noticed, they were alike that way.
“Where’s your camera, kid? The light’s unbelievable back by the sycamores.
There’s an old guy doing scrimshaw, the whole booth’s lit like a painting. You’d lose your mind.”
“Didn’t bring it,” Stella said.
Something went across Tyler’s face, quick, there and gone. “Well,” he said. “Next time. Come find me before you go, I want a picture of the three of you by the fountain.” And he was pulled back toward the pavilion by somebody with a question.
They made it another hour. Bea got everything she’d come for and more, and it should have been one of the best days of the summer, and the whole time, at the edge of it, the two of them dragged like something caught on the bottom of the boat.
By the time they were sitting on the low wall near the entrance, waiting for nothing, Stella picking the label off a water bottle and Joey lining the pieces up on his knee, Bea had finally had enough.
“Okay.” She set her bowl down beside her. “What is wrong with you two?”
“Nothing,” they said, at the same time, the least convincing thing two people had ever said.
“No, seriously. We have a day off. In the summer. At the festival. This is the good part. This is the thing you look forward to. There are a thousand beautiful things here and free samples and Tyler’s going to take our picture at the fountain, and you”—she pointed at Stella—”haven’t taken one photograph, and you”—at Joey—“have read the price of every object in this festival and purchased nothing, and you’re both acting like we’re at the DMV.
” She looked between them. “This is fun. People would kill for this. What is the matter with you?”
And there was a silence then that Bea couldn’t read—the two of them not looking at each other—and Stella opened her mouth, and Bea waited, ready finally for the answer.
“We’re just tired,” Stella said.
Which wasn’t it. Bea couldn’t have said how she knew, only that she knew, the way she could tell a color was off before she found the tube that would fix it.
But she also knew that was all she was getting, and there was still a whole festival behind her full of the things she loved, and a bowl the color of a shell in her lap, and her uncle wanted a picture.
“Fine,” Bea said. “Be tired. I’m going to go be a person having a nice time.
” She stood, and shook the grass off, and then—because they were her lumps, and she loved them even when they were being impossible—she held out both hands and hauled them up off the wall, one and then the other.
“Come on. Fountain. Smile like you mean it.”
They went. They stood by the fountain and Tyler came and framed them up, and Bea threw an arm around each of them and grinned, and on either side of her Stella and Joey put on the faces you put on for a picture your mother would want, and Tyler said got it and showed them the back of the camera, and it was a good one.
Water behind them, the light on it, all three of them smiling.
Two of the smiles were fake, but you’d never know it from the picture.