Epilogue #2
The painting in front of me is the biggest I’ve ever done.
Eight feet wide, five feet tall. It took me six months, working in stolen hours while the twins napped and Gracie ran her practice out of the truck.
She kept the Marigold work at first, driving out to Bree’s until the drive got to be too much, and then she did the only thing that ever made sense: she hung her own shingle.
Large-animal vet, Cedar Hollow and three counties around it, the job she trained for and shrank down and finally got back.
She earns more than I do most months now.
She likes to remind me of this. Waffles, meanwhile, tried to eat my supply of cadmium yellow.
This one isn’t only Gracie.
It’s all of us.
The four of us on the porch of the farmhouse at sunset, the fields stretching gold behind us.
Gracie’s sitting on the porch swing, Theo in her lap, his brown curls wild and his honey eyes fixed on a spot outside the frame, probably Biscuit, knowing her.
Vera’s standing beside me, my hand on her shoulder, her dark hair already long enough to brush her chin and her pale blue eyes looking directly at the viewer.
Challenging them. Daring them to look away.
And me. I’m in this one. Not hiding behind the brush, not absent from the frame. I’m there, with my family, silver in my hair and lines around my eyes and a smile on my face that I don’t think I’ve ever painted before.
Because I’ve never felt it before. Not like this.
The door at the bottom of the loft stairs creaks open.
“You up there?” Gracie calls.
“Where else would I be?”
“I don’t know, you’re a famous artist. You could be doing famous artist things.”
“I’m doing my favorite famous artist thing. Avoiding my responsibilities by making art.”
Her laugh echoes up the stairs, followed by the sound of her climbing. She emerges into the loft a moment later, Vera on her hip and Theo toddling ahead of her with the single-minded determination of a tiny drunk person.
“Dada!” Theo spots me and charges, nearly faceplanting twice before reaching my legs and grabbing on like a barnacle.
“Hey, buddy.” I scoop him up, settling him on my hip. “Come to supervise?”
“He keeps trying to eat the crayons,” Gracie says. “I figured oil paints would be a step up.”
“They’re absolutely not.”
“I’m kidding. Mostly.” She stops in front of the canvas, Vera twisting in her arms to look. For a long moment, she doesn’t say anything.
I watch her face instead of the painting. I already know every brushstroke, every shadow, every place where the color is exactly right and every place where it’s not quite but close enough. What I need to know is whether I got it.
Whether I captured what I was trying to capture.
Gracie’s throat moves as she swallows. “Mal.”
“Yeah?”
“You finished it.”
“Just now. The varnish is still wet.”
She sets Vera down, and our daughter immediately toddles toward the canvas with intent. I intercept her with my free hand before she can make a Vera-sized handprint in the lower left corner.
“Not yet, bug. It’s not done done.”
“Duh,” Vera says, which is her response to most things. She’s a woman of few words, our girl.
“It’s beautiful,” Gracie says quietly. She’s standing right in front of it now, close enough to see the brushwork. “It’s… Mal, it’s everything.”
“That’s the idea.”
She turns to look at me, and her eyes are wet. “You put yourself in it.”
“Figured it was time.” I shift Theo higher on my hip. “Spent twenty years painting the world. Spent five years painting you. Maybe it’s time to paint what I want to remember.”
“What’s that?”
“This.” I gesture at the canvas, at our kids, at the golden light slanting through the loft windows. “The part that actually matters.”
Gracie crosses to me. Takes my face in her hands. Kisses me slow and deep while our children squirm between us and make disgusted toddler noises.
“Ew,” Theo contributes.
“Very ew,” Vera agrees.
Gracie pulls back, laughing. “Alright, alright. I have a job to do.”
She walks to my supply table and picks up the smallest brush, the one I keep specifically for this purpose, even now. Dips it in the lampblack. Turns to the painting.
“Where do you want it?”
“Lower right corner. Like always.”
She nods. Steps up to the canvas. Her hand is steady as she presses the brush to the surface, and I watch the letters appear one by one, the same way I’ve watched them appear so many times before.
E.
V.
E.
R.
Y.
T.
H.
I.
N.
G.
EVERYTHING.
Gracie steps back. The title gleams wet in the corner, black against the gold.
“There,” she says softly. “Now it’s done done.”
Before dinner, though, we go up the hill.
We do it most Sundays now, the four of us, up to the family plot under the live oaks where Gracie’s parents are buried.
She carries Vera and I carry Theo, and Waffles trails behind us uninvited, because Waffles goes where he pleases.
The grass is soft and the light is doing that gold thing over the fields, and Gracie crouches down between the two headstones the way she must have so many times before I ever earned the right to come with her.