“She has that effect on people, especially the children we work with at Coming Home.” Her eyes lock on mine as I walk over to the table.
“Children?” She nearly chokes out the word, but she keeps scratching the black spot on the top of Eliza’s head. A shadow seems to pass over Cadence’s face, but she recovers quickly. “That’s your nonprofit, right? Coming Home?” Her tone is uncertain, but her face brightens when I bring the bread, eggs, and bacon over to the table. I start doling out large portions for each of us and watch her face as she starts buttering a slice of my bread.
“It is. I take it you didn’t look it up before signing on?” I raise an eyebrow as I sit down and try not to smile. I wouldn’t have guessed such a good artist would come out to New Mexico on a whim without looking at the project she was offered, but here she is. Everyone has their stories, I guess.
She looks down at her hands, her fingers flying around with nervousness. “I—uh—I did—but—”
“But you didn’t. That’s okay. We’ll let you stay, won’t we, Eliza?” Cadence won’t quite meet my eye, but she’s digging into the fig preserves and slathering it across the bread with gusto, so my guess is that she’s not going to dart out of the door any time soon.
“I needed a project. I needed to get out of the city,” she says, still looking down at her bread. She takes an enormous bite and adds, “I’m sorry, Rowan. I don’t even know you and—”
I put up my hand to stop her. “It’s fine. I was just giving you a hard time. I guess it just give us something to talk about here at the breakfast table.” She looks skeptical, but she keeps eating. And so I don’t get lost in watching her eat, I launch into talking. “New Mexico, just like every state, has its underprivileged populations. And here, we’ve got the Mescalero Reservation. Apache people. There’s a lack of resources, social services, that kind of thing, especially with an understanding of their culture. There’s also runaway kids down from Albuquerque, kids born addicted to drugs. It looks like heaven out here, and really it is, but even in the resort town of Ruidoso, there’s need for people who will care about these children—and their parents too. The ones who have parents. We do therapy of all kinds, and experimental stuff too. Animal therapy, art therapy, music therapy. We provide housing and a safe haven for all domestic abuse victims—”
“So Coming Home basically does everything?” She laughs. “Big goals, right?”
“That’s it. Big goals. My family has money, lots of it. And my brothers all do big important things. But if I can do this little important thing for this little population of people—”
“Then you’ve really done something.”
“Something I can rest my name on. That’s right. You get it. It’s something that counts. I give a lot of my own money to it, but in order for it to work, it has to have people from the community interested in keeping it going. People interested in working there, the best and the brightest. There’s a sister site starting up in New York City, so we wanted a muralist from the city, someone to weave the tale of Coming Home. You did that with your mural for the Children’s Scholarship Fund.”
“What about a local artist—why not someone from the reservation?”
“We do have an artist in residence, and she did a mural on one side of the building. You’ll do one on the other. You really didn’t read any of the documents I sent you?” I laugh out loud. “You are straight crazy for coming out here, but I like it. I really do. Why in the hell did you?”
That same look flashes across her face again. I want to pry it open, figure her out like the little mystery she is. But I stay silent and just watch her face while she thinks. “I needed space,” she says simply.
“We got plenty of that out here. Plenty.” I let it rest at that. I’ve learned from experience not to ask more when a woman clams shut like that. It’s best to come out all in its own time. And usually that time doesn’t happen within twelve hours of meeting someone. I rip off another slice of bread and smear it with butter and honey. We sit in silence for minutes—I don’t know how many—and the only sound is that of Eliza snoring underfoot.
Hesitantly at first, Cadence starts to tell me about her process, the nonprofits she’s worked with before, why she decided to become a muralist in the first place. Her words weave the tale of why she is who she is—the artist mother, the lawyer father, the sister who’s a practical pharmacist. She doesn’t say it, but to her, that family is everything. I can see her face light up when she talks about it.