She felt cozy and secure; she made herself a big breakfast and she ate it in her bathrobe. The cat, meanwhile, perched precariously on the windowsill and stared out at the snow, transfixed. “Quite a surprise, isn’t it?” Mercy said, and Desmond turned briefly and raised his eyebrows at her.
The phone rang: Robin, of course. “You okay there?” he asked.
“I’m fine,” she said. “How are things at the house?”
“Pretty good. They haven’t plowed the roads yet, though. I’m going to come over on foot and bring your boots so you can walk back with me.”
“Oh, don’t do that! I can manage!”
“It’s no trouble; the walk will do me good,” he said.
“Robin. Really. I’m smack-dab in the middle of a painting right now. I was planning to work all day anyhow, and I have plenty to eat and drink. I could stay holed up for days!”
“Well, but I was thinking I could light us a fire in the fireplace,” he said.
“Yes, do that! Light yourself a fire and get all comfy and be glad you don’t have to go anywhere. I’m certainly glad!”
“Oh.”
“I’m going to get so much done!”
“Oh.”
“I’ll come by later. Bye!”
But “later” was three days later. By that time, they’d cleared the roads, if not the sidewalks, so she could walk back to the house if she kept to the street. Robin was off at work when she got there; it was early afternoon. She found the kitchen a bit scattered-looking—cocoa tin left out on the counter, dishes stacked in the sink—and from the afghan and pillow lying on the couch she guessed he might have spent at least one night in front of the TV instead of going upstairs to bed.
First she started a load of laundry, adding the clothes she found in the bathroom hamper to those she’d brought from the studio; and then she tidied the kitchen and mixed a meatloaf, using the ground beef from the fridge. It was her plan to put it in the oven at about four thirty or five, so that they could have it for supper. But it wasn’t even two yet, and once she had gone through the mail, and vacuumed the living-room rug, and switched the laundry from the washer to the dryer, she changed her mind. She wrote Robin a note, “Bake at 350o one hr.,” and she taped it to the loaf pan, which she set in the fridge at eye level where he couldn’t miss it. Then she put on her snow boots and walked back to her studio.
Spring came early that year, at the very beginning of March. Lavender crocuses started speckling the lawn, in among the grass blades where they weren’t supposed to be growing. One morning the Motts’ huge oak filled up with tiny birds, so many of them that all at once the bare tree seemed abundantly leafed, and they made a busy chittering sound like hundreds of scissors snipping. Desmond stared round-eyed from the windowsill with his chin quivering.
Lily’s baby arrived, a boy, and she and Morris moved into their new house. They were planning to have a quiet wedding as soon as their divorces came through. Alice’s Robby began talking, and once she started she wouldn’t stop; Alice kept a notebook of all her funny sayings. David wrote to say that a skit of his would be staged in the college auditorium.
In April Mercy invited her three closest friends to the studio for tea: Darlene from high school and Carolyn and Bridey, whose children had grown up with her children. None of them knew she didn’t live at the house anymore. The few times they’d gotten together lately it was only for a movie or for lunch at a local café; no need for her to explain where she was coming from or going back to.
Her excuse for having them come to the studio was that she wanted to show them her portraits, but she served real tea from a teapot and cookies she’d bought at the Giant just the same as if she were entertaining at home. The three of them perched in a row on the daybed and sipped from cups that she had carried over in her tote. They all said they liked the portraits very much. Well, what else could they say, of course, but Bridey did ask, “So if you came over to paint my house, what part of it would you focus on?”
“I wouldn’t know what part, at the outset,” Mercy said. “I would just make some quick overall sketches and then come back here to figure that out.”
“Why is that? Why wouldn’t you need to paint the detailed part while you were there at the house?”
“Because the whole reason I’m painting the detailed part is, that is what’s ended up being the only thing I remember,” Mercy said patiently. “It’s the one part I really saw, it turns out. So I know it must be what’s important.”