“So,” Cheryl said. “You wanted to talk.”
“I wanted to ask,” Lavender said. “What his life has been like.”
“I’m glad you came to me,” Cheryl said. “And not—well, not to Ellis.”
“Does he know?”
“He’s always known he’s adopted, yes. But he doesn’t know we’re meeting. I didn’t want to add anything more to his plate.”
A thick ball appeared in Lavender’s throat, looming unwelcome.
“Is he happy?” Lavender asked.
“Oh yes,” Cheryl said. A sliver of genuine smile. “I’ve hardly met someone happier.”
“He grew up in New York City?” Lavender said.
Cheryl nodded. “He lives upstate now. We used to rent a cabin in the Adirondacks every summer—we thought it would be nice to keep him connected to his roots, and Ellis has always loved the mountains. He’s lived up there since high school graduation. He’d been accepted at NYU, but Denny and I could see he wasn’t happy. Ellis wanted something else, something beyond what the city could give him, beyond what everyone expected. He met Rachel that June. We learned in August that she was pregnant. Sometimes life has a way of telling you where you belong, don’t you think? Anyway, they opened a restaurant. Ellis bakes the most incredible sourdough.”
The heaviness built in Lavender’s glands, a suffocation. She wished, with a feverish desperation, that she’d never let Harmony talk her into this. It was too big. Too much.
“So there’s—a grandchild?”
Cheryl nodded. She leaned in, her scent lingering, expensive and tasteful, like sunflowers.
“I have an idea,” Cheryl said. “Why don’t we go over to the gallery? The opening isn’t for another hour, but everything is already set up. I can give you a private tour.”
The offer felt like a sort of generosity. A hand, outstretched. Lavender followed Cheryl from the coffee shop, her tea steaming untouched on the table.
The afternoon had grown dense, the sky a stormy gray. The street bustled and brayed—Lavender felt a distinct relief when they reached the storefront at the end of the block.
The gallery itself was just a small white room. Four walls, barren and spare. A beggar was curled on the stoop in front of the door, but Cheryl stepped confidently over him and ushered Lavender inside. In the corner of the room, two young women in button-up shirts were organizing bottles of wine, stacking glasses across a crisp tablecloth.
“I’ve titled it Homeland,” Cheryl said amiably, gesturing to the far wall, where a series of frames were lined up evenly. “It’s meant to show how we are always reinventing ourselves, creating new homes to accompany our various evolutions. The family pictured here is both evolving and permanent. I wanted to explore that paradox.”
Lavender stepped close to the photo in the center.
It was unmistakable.
Baby Packer. No longer a baby. Grown now.
Ellis Harrison looked nothing like the child she remembered. Of course, Lavender chastised herself, he had been too young then, just a blob of squishy infant. But the photograph proved it, beyond doubt. It was her son. The portrait was taken in blinding color: Ellis stood against a paneled wall, painted a vibrant shade of blue. He peered sagely into the camera, a smudge of something dark streaking across his cheek. Charcoal, or maybe kitchen grease. His freckles spattered in patterns she recognized—the Big Dipper stretched across his nose in a constellation that perfectly mirrored Lavender’s own. His eyes belonged to Lavender too, heavy-lidded, with lashes so light they were nearly transparent. She understood why Cheryl watched her, hawkish and curious. The boy was so obviously Lavender’s. Johnny had only made the smallest appearance, in the set of Ellis’s jaw.
Lavender did not want to cry, but the intensity of the day had compounded. It reverberated, an ache in her jaw.
The next photo featured a little girl, maybe six years old. She reached one hand up toward Ellis, while the other stretched to examine something on the sidewalk. A dandelion.
“Her name is Blue,” Cheryl said from behind.
“Blue,” Lavender said.
Cheryl rolled her eyes. “Her name is Beatrice, actually, but the locals nicknamed her. She’s a precocious little girl, very empathetic. Last month they found an injured garden snake in a box under her bed—she’d been nursing it back to health.” Cheryl chuckled. “That’s the restaurant. The Blue House.”
The following photographs were set inside the restaurant. Blue perched on the kitchen counter while a pretty brunette chopped a large bowl of scallions. Ellis and the woman, his wife, attended to different tasks at the industrial stove—the camera captured a glint of spatula, a curl of steam, a garbage can overflowing with corn husks. There was a shot of Blue, her lips clasped around a straw as she suckled soda from a plastic cup. Blue, sitting in a booth with French fries up her nose, playing walrus. The last photo in the collection felt, to Lavender, like hyperventilation. Ellis and his wife hunched at a long oak bar, seemingly blind to the camera. Little Blue was tucked between them, her parents’ cheeks resting on either side of her head. Looking, Lavender could almost smell the girl’s scalp. That child scent, sticky and sweet.