Truly(97)

“I doubt it,” he said. “I can help.”

“Are you any use in the kitchen?”

“I know my way around.”

“All right. I’ll let you wash and chop a little if you promise not to wear yourself out. Do you want some more coffee? I have to drink coffee all day long, or I collapse in a heap. After my hernia surgery they told me to stay off the coffee for forty-eight hours, and I was a wreck. You remember, don’t you, May?”

“You wouldn’t get up off the couch. You kept saying, ‘Don’t look at me,’ like a soap opera character.”

“I wasn’t that bad.”

“Yes you were,” Allie said.

“Out of here, the both of you.” She made a shooing gesture with her hands. “I don’t want to see you again until all the centerpieces are done.”

May widened her eyes as she walked past him, and he widened his back.

This is crazy, hers said.

I know, his confirmed.

She was smiling a little as she disappeared from sight.

Nancy handed him a plastic-wrapped bundle of celery hearts. “You can start by washing these.”

Once Nancy had him working, she forgot to be a polite hostess and began issuing a steady stream of orders. She had him wash all the vegetables that would become part of lunch, then gave him a cutting board and a knife and put him to work chopping.

Her knives were awful, but he didn’t mind the work. May and Allie bustled through the kitchen five or six times as they carried craft supplies from the back porch to the living room. He caught stray bits of their conversation, mostly jokey insults. Nancy fielded three phone calls, reaching past him every time to snag the phone from the wall on the far side of the countertop. The third time she did it, he noticed the framed watercolor hanging to the right of the phone.

White space divided the paper into four small scenes, like a comic book page. A tiny dumpling-looking girl with a red cap sat at a toadstool table, sipping tea. In the next frame, she was getting into bed, but there was a lump beneath the covers. The third frame showed her discovering a mischievous kitten in her bed, and finally they sat together at the toadstool, each with her own tiny cup of tea.

It was whimsical and light, the colors bright. It didn’t match the rest of the decor, which could have come from an upscale home-decorating store at the mall—earth tones, carefully matched accent colors, collections of photographs with words like love and family and inspiration marching across the frames.

The next time May passed him, he asked, “Did you do this?”

She had her arms full of fake flowers, and she dropped a bunch of them on the floor when she turned to see what he meant. “What? Oh. Yeah. In high school.”

She bent over to gather the daisies.

“It’s great.”

“Thanks.”

She and Allie crossed paths on her way out of the room. “There’s just a few more daisies,” she said.

“Okay.” Allie disappeared onto the porch, then reappeared, daisy-laden. “These are going to be the ugliest centerpieces in the history of time,” she muttered.

Ben angled his chin at the picture. “She’s really good.”

“Yeah,” Allie agreed. “But she never believed it mattered.”

Nancy reached past him to hang up the phone. “Sorry! You don’t mind, do you?”

“It’s not a problem.”

“You need to get a cell, Mom,” Allie said as she left.

“Who needs one more phone bill?” Nancy returned to the stovetop, where a big stockpot had come to a boil. She dumped in two boxes of macaroni.

“Does she still draw?” he asked.

“Who, May?”

“Yeah.”

“She doodles. Mostly on the corners of things. Receipts, napkins. Always doodling, that girl. I used to find her drawings in the strangest places. One year, I took the pan for the Thanksgiving turkey out of storage, and there was a little drawing of a turkey inside it. He was trussed up with his head still on and a little ‘gobble gobble’ coming out of his mouth. It was the cutest thing. I still chuckle every year when I get the pan.”

The phone rang, and Ben lifted the receiver and handed it to her. Nancy smiled, answered a few questions from the other end, and hung up, shaking her head.

“Bill’s at the rental place collecting the tablecloths,” she said. “It doesn’t sound like it’s going well.”

Bill had to be May’s missing father. “Is he artistic?”

“He couldn’t draw a stick figure to save his life. I think May gets that from my side of the family. I wanted to be a sculptor. Thought I would be famous, if you can imagine that. Who’s ever heard of a famous sculptor?”