Mercy was more interesting-looking than most old ladies—still thin, with a flyaway bun and a small, pointy face. She was wearing a man’s shirt as a smock, probably Pop-Pop’s, long enough so it almost covered her skirt, and she had a slightly bitter smell, like tea. Her studio was the kind of place Candle approved of but knew she could never manage for herself, because her room at home was chronically messy whereas here, all the surfaces were bare and everything had been put away. She stepped inside and looked around appreciatively, and then she handed over the folder containing her work. “Mom says to tell you she’ll stop in when she picks me up,” she said, and Mercy nodded, but absently, because she was already opening the folder and looking at the top painting.
“They’re not very good, I’m afraid,” Candle said.
Mercy glanced over at her. “Never tell people that,” she said. “Rule One.”
“Okay, but I mean, they’re just stuff I did at camp.”
Mercy started laying the pictures in a row across the table, moving aside several paint tubes to make room. “Hmm,” she said as she examined each one. “Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.”
First the fruit bowl and the Kool-Aid. Then a tree by the lake at camp with huge plates of white fungus sticking out from its trunk like CDs when you hit the Eject button. And then a portrait: Ditsy Brown from cabin 8. Ditsy’s plump left shin, crossed over her right knee, was the largest object in the picture because it happened to be closest to the viewer. The effect was cartoonish, Candle saw now. It was not what she’d been aiming for at all. She started to say so but stopped herself, and they moved on to a picture of a rowboat.
One of Mercy’s paintings, half finished, lay on the other side of the table. It showed somebody’s front porch. Candle knew it was only half finished because it was nothing but a vague smear of floorboards and Adirondack chairs, with no part detailed. All of Mercy’s paintings featured one tiny portion that was super-detailed. She must find Candle’s paintings childish; they were so ordinary and same-all-over.
“I know they’re not like yours,” Candle told her, and Mercy said, “Well, I should hope not. They shouldn’t be like anyone’s.” Then she gathered the paintings up again and slipped them back into their folder. “But I can see why you’d want to try a different medium,” she said, “because your style relies upon line. You’d find linear painting easier with oils or acrylics. Would you like to try my acrylics?”
“Yes!” Candle said.
“Let me set you up, then, and you see what you think.”
She tore a piece of paper off a pad and laid it in front of Candle, along with a couple of pencils. Candle sat down at the table and slid a finger testingly across the surface of the paper, which had a woven feeling, like cloth.
“Now for your subject matter…” Mercy said, and she went to the kitchen area and started rustling around. When she returned she had a cantaloupe, a bottle of apple juice, and a wooden-handled string dish mop. “Pay no mind to the weird assemblage,” she told Candle as she positioned them on the table. “I wanted to give you a variety of textures. Just experiment; try using different-size brushes. I’ll leave you to it.”
And then she crossed the room to the daybed, where she settled herself with a flounce of her shirttails and reached over to turn on the radio. WLIF, it sounded like; an old-people station. From behind one of the couch cushions—the big one, which was really a bed pillow—she pulled a library book covered in clear plastic and opened it and started reading, meanwhile wagging her feet back and forth in time to something waltzy on the radio. She was small enough that her feet stuck straight out in front of her on the daybed, like a child’s.
At first Candle felt lost. Shouldn’t she be getting some sort of instruction, here? But eventually she drew a few tentative lines to indicate the three objects, and then she picked up a tube of yellow paint and squirted a blob onto the palette. It was just as well, she realized, that she’d been left to her own devices, with no one to wince and suck in a sharp breath if she happened to do something wrong.
She tried a round-tipped brush and then a slant-edged one, dipping each first in the jar of water next to Mercy’s vase of brushes. She tried mixing a little white with the yellow to make it paler; she was working on the apple juice. Mercy was humming along with the radio now, but only off and on—a measure or two under her breath as she turned a page. Candle’s mother claimed Mercy read junk. English whodunnits, mostly, she said. “I personally,” she often added, “have never been able to care who done it, myself.”