Drawing Home

by Jamie Brenner

  So. The situation was so simple, it was practically a cliché.

  “Who are you?” Bea said.

  “I’m Emma Mapson. This is my daughter, Penny, and—”

  “What are you doing here?” Bea said, moving to lean against the table. She’d barely slept. She was exhausted. The stress of it all.

  “I could ask the same of you, Ms. Winstead.”

  The nerve! “This house belonged to my very dear, recently deceased friend Henry Wyatt. That’s what I’m doing here. Now, since I knew Mr. Wyatt for fifty years and he never mentioned your name, I’d love to hear your excuse.”

  “First, I’m sorry for your loss. Mr. Wyatt was a very nice man. My daughter here had come to know him pretty well the past year or so. He gave her drawing lessons.”

  “Drawing lessons,” Bea said, spitting the words.

  “Yes. And he was a regular at the bar.”

  “None of that explains your presence in this house.”

  The woman turned to her daughter and suggested she sit out on the deck with the older man who was with them. Bea looked around for Kyle. Where on earth had he run off to?

  Emma Mapson suggested they sit; she pulled out a chair from the dining-room table and offered it to Bea. Bea wanted to refuse, to say she preferred to stand, but her hip was bothering her. It was the damn stairs at the hotel. She had enough pride, however, to choose her own seat.

  Emma sat across from her. “The truth is, Ms. Winstead, I just learned yesterday that my daughter has inherited this house.”

  “Inherited this house. An astonishing turn of fortune, wouldn’t you say?” Bea leaned forward, bracing herself with her elbows on the table.

  “It’s come as a shock, yes.”

  “Oh, save it! A shock? You expect me—you expect anyone—to believe you weren’t a party to this? That you didn’t actively scheme to get Henry Wyatt’s estate?”

  The woman shook her head. “I understand you’re upset. You’ve suffered a loss. But I had nothing to do with this house situation.”

  “I don’t believe you. Not for one minute. And I’m not leaving town until I get to the bottom of this. Just so you know, I’ve gone through all the art that is in this house. If any of it goes missing, I will see you in court.”

  It took some effort to stand up without shaking. She was more upset than she had realized, and it required all the strength she could muster just to maintain the illusion of calm and control as she walked away.

  Now if she could just find Kyle.

  Chapter Nine

  Penny hadn’t wanted to leave Henry’s house. It was beyond beautiful, perfect in all the ways she’d expect a house that Henry had lived in would be. She saw him everywhere in the smooth pale wood and the stone and the massive windows. So much natural light! Henry was all about good light.

  The best part was the pool. It was so narrow and smooth, it looked like a sliver of sky. It seemed like something designed for people to admire, not swim in. But she wanted to swim in it. And Henry must have wanted her to swim in it, because for some amazing reason he’d left the house to her. Finally, finally, something in her life was good. Something was special.

  But then the old lady in the tweed jacket and giant pearls showed up.

  Penny didn’t know what the old lady said to upset her mother but as soon as the two of them were done talking, her mother made Penny get back in the car and they left Henry’s house.

  “Who was that?” she’d asked her mom in the car.

  “She said she was an old friend of Henry’s.”

  “Is she angry that he left us the house?”

  “That appears to be the case.”

  End of conversation. Now, alone in her bedroom, Penny opened the hutch under her desk, pulled out her drawing board and paper, and carried the supplies to her bed. She rested the drawing board on her lap, ran her hand over the surface. For the first time since hearing about Henry’s death, she had the urge to draw.

  The board was one of the first art supplies Henry had given her. He’d gotten it for her after he’d found her sitting on the hotel-lobby couch and sketching on a piece of paper resting on her crossed legs.

  “We create the lights and darks in drawing by varying the pressure applied to the pencil, right?” he’d said, looming over her. “So we need an even, hard surface underneath the paper.”

  The next day, her mother came home from work with the drawing board. “A little something from your art fairy godfather,” she said with a smile. A week later, her mother came back with graphite pencils in 4H, HB, and 4B. She’d made Penny write a thank-you note.

  “I don’t have his address,” Penny said.

  “Just hand it to him the next time you see him.”

  Penny dutifully wrote the note and sealed it in an envelope. A few days later, when she was sitting in the lobby doing her homework, he ambled in and took his usual spot at the end of the bar. She felt awkward going up to him, but he’d seen her—acknowledged her with a little wave—so there was no avoiding it.

  “Thank you so much for the pencils. I love them,” she said, handing him the note.

  “What’s this?” he said.

  “A thank-you note.”

  “But you just thanked me.”

  Penny felt herself turn red.

  Henry placed the envelope on the bar. “I considered adding an eight B to your collection—the eight B creates wonderful darks. But I suspect you won’t keep up with the sharpening maintenance.”

  A few months ago, he had presented her with a pack of 8Bs.

  Penny bit her lip, fighting tears. Dr. Wang had told her she needed to learn the difference between things to really be upset about and things that were just getting caught in a loop in her mind. Was this one of those things? She didn’t know.

  She’d told Henry once about what Dr. Wang said, that she shouldn’t think about what was bothering her over and over and over again, that she needed to let such worries float away. Henry didn’t look up from his drawing but said after a minute or so, “Do you know what happens when an irritant works its way into an oyster? As a defense mechanism, the oyster coats it with fluid, layer after layer. Over and over and over again. And in the end, a beautiful pearl is formed.”

  Thinking about it now, Penny sobbed, her tears soaking the blank piece of paper in front of her. Another thing Henry always said was that a blank piece of paper was just a drawing waiting to be completed. But it was so hard to draw now that he was gone.

  “Knock, knock,” her mother said, rapping once before opening the bedroom door. Penny quickly wiped her eyes but it was no use trying to hide anything from her mother. “Are you crying?”

  Her mother sat on the edge of her bed and reached out to hug her, but Penny pulled away.

  “What’s wrong, hon?”

  Penny shrugged, and she saw her mother’s face tense. It was her I don’t have time to deal with your nervous breakdown look.

  “Angus is leaving soon for the historical society. You’re supposed to start helping out there this week.”

  “Ugh! It’s so boring.”

  “Penny, our family has been part of this town for hundreds of years. Your ancestors helped defend Sag Harbor against the British during the Revolutionary War. We’re lucky the history of this town is being preserved. When you’re old enough to get a paying job, you can find another way to spend your summers. But for now, this is what you’re doing.”

  “What about the house?”

  Her mother inhaled deeply. “Nothing is changing for now. We need to just continue with our normal lives. Let me worry about the house.”

  “I want to live there.”

  Emma shook her head. “Big and fancy isn’t always better, you know. We’re lucky to have this place so close to town. We’ve been here since you were three.”

  “Yeah, but we rent it. It’s not ours.”

  “No, the property technically is not ours. But it is our home. And it upsets me to think you feel it somehow isn’t good
enough. That…mansion has nothing to do with normal people like us.”

  “Is this because of the old woman? Is she telling you we can’t live there?”

  “This has nothing to do with anyone, Penny. It’s my feeling about what’s best for our family and how we live our lives.”

  “Henry wanted me to have it. Why are you getting in the way? You always say no to things, and then you wonder why I’m so unhappy!” She looked down at the blank sheet of paper on her lap, warped and ruined by her tears.

  Emma preferred to cut flowers late in the day—it was one of the small things that extended their vase life. But she wanted to bring a bunch to the hotel to set in the lobby. It made her happy to look across the room and see her own yellow New Day hybrid teas and her white Iceberg floribunda. Jack appreciated it too. He said her flowers lasted days longer than the blooms he bought weekly from the florist. Again, her mother’s expertise guided her. It was all in the attention to detail: selecting the flowers at the right stage, clipping at the optimal time of day, when the stem had food reserves, cutting at a forty-five-degree angle, and then immediately putting them in water.

  Emma set a bucket of fresh water on the ground and cut the flowers whose petals were unfolding. She placed each stem in the bucket. When she ran out of open blooms, she felt around the closed buds, squeezing a few to see if any were soft enough that they would open in the vase.

  The sound of a buzz saw next door irritated her. She glanced over the hedge into her neighbor Ken Cutty’s backyard. It had been Angus and Celia’s home before Celia died, and they had been much better neighbors. Lately, Ken had been piling a lot of lumber in the yard. A discarded refrigerator was out there too, along with a few iron drums whose purpose she couldn’t identify. The place was an eyesore.

  Angus came out onto the back porch. “Is Penny coming with me to work?”

  “She’s going to bike over.”

  “I can drive her. Leaving in an hour.”

  “I think she wants to be able to come and go on her own,” Emma said apologetically.

  Emma wondered for the millionth time why Angus turned her into an approval-seeking adolescent. She knew that, from a psychology standpoint, it was because she’d lost her father at such a young age. From any older male figure Emma knew, she found herself looking for either guidance or validation. It had been this way her entire life.

  She was also painfully aware that, just as she had been raised by a single mother, history was now repeating itself. Though in some ways, she felt her daughter’s situation was worse than her own had been. Her father’s sudden death when she was still in elementary school had been devastating. But up until that point, Tom Kirkland had been a pretty great dad to Emma. Penny had never experienced a normal, day-to-day life with her father.

  That was partly why she liked having Angus around. Aside from the logistics of having another adult to help out, she wanted some sort of male figure for Penny.

  “This house thing is complicated,” Emma said, moving her bucket of clipped roses out of the sun. She looked at him. “You haven’t really weighed in. Why?”

  “Celia always said I had a way of not talking to her when she wanted to talk, then trying to press her into talking when she needed space. I try to correct that whenever I can.”

  Angus had a sonorous voice, and it made everything he said seem wise. Emma nodded. “I’d like your opinion.”

  “Well, I think the situation is peculiar.”

  “That is it, Angus. It is most definitely peculiar. And I’m not sure what to do about it.”

  “What are the options?”

  Emma leaned back on her heels, wiping her brow with the back of her arm. “I could just leave the house alone and let Penny deal with it when she turns eighteen.”

  “Or?”

  “Or I could move in. But that woman is going to fight me in court. I don’t have the resources to fight back.”

  “What if she doesn’t bother taking you to court?”

  “Okay, so, another thing is I guess a part of me can’t imagine living in that big fancy space. Can you?”

  Angus laughed. “I’m not living in that crazy house.”

  She looked at him, startled. “What? Oh, Angus. Of course you will. We need you around.”

  He smiled. “I didn’t say I’m going to disappear. But maybe this is a sign it’s time for me to live on my own.”

  Emma dropped her clippers onto the grass and stood up.

  “No, it’s not. And you know Celia would agree with me. There was a reason she made both of us promise that you would move in with us. She didn’t want you living alone.” In her final days, Celia had been thinking only about Angus. She told Emma, “I’m not afraid to go. I’m just afraid to leave him behind.”

  Angus shook his head. “I have to say, though I never admitted this to Celia, it was a mistake to have sold the Ninevah Beach house. I’ve never felt quite at home since.”

  Angus, like many of his generation, had faced a real estate dilemma. The former African-American enclaves of Ninevah Beach, Azurest, and Sag Harbor Hills had become appealing to a wider number of home buyers when the entire Hamptons area exploded in popularity. By the early 2000s, Angus’s family home had increased to nearly ten times the amount it had been purchased for. And as he and Celia faced retirement, the ballooning property taxes combined with the potential payday of selling had made holding on to the house impractical.

  “Angus, I understand that the idea of moving from here might trigger complicated feelings. But whatever decision is made, I want us to make it as a family.”

  Across the lawn, the buzz saw started up again. Angus waved her closer to the house. When she reached the porch, he said, “Emma, this really isn’t about what you want or what I want. There’s only one thing to think about here: What’s best for the child? The rest of it is just noise.”

  It wasn’t just the deep voice; Angus was wise.

  Chapter Ten

  On the southern end of Main Street, quaint, historic clapboard houses merged seamlessly with the commercial storefronts. Penny’s favorite yogurt shop, BuddhaBerry, was a two-story house with wide stone steps and white pillars. If it weren’t for the chalkboard sign outside that read ARTISAN-QUALITY FROZEN YOGURT! WAFFLES! CREPES! BUBBLE TEAS!, it would be easy to miss.

  BuddhaBerry had colorful mosaic-tiled tables, bright orange walls, and lots of Asian lanterns. It was just the medicine Penny needed before starting her sentence—sorry, her shift—at the historical society. Considering what time it was, she should have taken her pomegranate yogurt topped with shaved coconut and chocolate chunks to go, but she couldn’t resist stalling at a table.

  God, she hated the historical society. It was just across the street but it might as well have been in another universe. The museum was formerly the Annie Cooper Boyd House, an eighteenth-century shack. Angus always tried to make it sound interesting but failed miserably.

  “The house was once thought to be the place where David Frothingham first published the Long Island Herald. That was Long Island’s first newspaper in the 1790s,” Angus had told her.

  “Okay,” Penny had said politely.

  “But in fact, research has proven this untrue. It’s more likely that Frothingham ran the business from a building across the street.”

  Thanks to Angus, Penny knew enough trivia about Sag Harbor to make her a useful volunteer. But, as she told her mother, it was so friggin’ boring!

  Penny pulled a book out of her bag, The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl: Squirrel Meets World. This was a reread for her, but she needed something light after This One Summer. This old favorite was way less depressing. It was about a girl her age named Doreen Green who moves from California to New Jersey and totally doesn’t fit in. But she has superpowers. All the books Penny liked best were about underdogs who finally got their day.

  Squirrel Girl was the first graphic novel she’d shown to Henry. When she’d pulled it out of her bag, he was initially dismissive.

&nbs
p; “I’ve never been a fan of comics,” he’d said.

  “It’s a graphic novel.”

  He flipped through the pages. “Are they very popular with kids your age?”

  “Graphic novels? Yeah. Totally.”

  “Why not just read a novel? There’s something to be said for just a good, old-fashioned book.”

  “Henry, this is a great story and great art. I mean, you of all people should get that.”

  He smiled at her. “You certainly know how to sell it. Although I don’t like the term graphic novel.”

  “What would you call it?” she asked him.

  “Sequential art.”

  “A sequential-art novel? That definitely does not sound as good.”

  He asked to see more, and she brought him her copies of Coraline, The Graveyard Book, Awkward. She showed him Ms. Marvel and Roller Girl. He took them home and read them all.

  Henry appreciated the underdog element of the stories. He told her that someday she would find her own superpower. She just had to be patient. In that moment, she had believed him. But now that he was gone, she wasn’t so sure.

  She tossed her empty yogurt container in the garbage and packed her book away. Hopefully Angus would be busy and wouldn’t notice if she sneaked off to the back room to read for an hour or two.

  Penny walked down the BuddhaBerry steps just as Robin and Mindy were coming up. Everything about Penny that was wrong, Mindy got right: her hair (straight), her clothes (new), her jewelry (real), her phone (the latest). It was like she didn’t even have to try.

  She had every intention of slipping by with just a wave; the last thing she wanted to do was talk about her nonexistent summer-vacation plans.

  “OMG, Penny, I was just talking about you,” Mindy said, grabbing her by the arm.

  “You were?” It was unimaginable that she would ever cross Mindy’s mind, let alone be the topic of conversation. She could barely believe she was speaking to her.