“One time, me and my best friend, Mare, wanted to do a lemonade stand so badly. It’s all we talked about, even though Cade and my parents kept telling us that we lived on the edge of town, no one was driving by to stop for lemonade. Mare and I would hear none of it,” Pippa explains, laughing to herself.
Something about her makes me want to laugh along with her, as if I was remembering the same memory she is. It’s just the two of us, our horses, and the mountains around us. I feel like without the distraction of the real world, I can almost let my guard down with her. At least enough to enjoy hearing what it’d be like to have a parent who cared about you.
“So, come to find out, my mom forced half the town to drive out to the ranch to visit our lemonade stand. Mare and I were so young and naive we truly thought everyone was driving by and wanted to taste our lemonade, but no, it wasn’t that. It was because my mom strong-armed half the Sutten population to purchase glasses of overpriced lemonade from us.”
“What’d you buy with the hard-earned money?”
“An Easy-Bake Oven,” she answers immediately.
“I have no idea what that is.”
“Oh my god!” She sits up on her knees, slapping the ground underneath her as she looks at me in shock. “You don’t know what an Easy-Bake Oven is?”
I shake my head.
She sighs dramatically, as if the fact I didn’t grow up with whatever this appliance is was the reason my childhood sucked. “You’re right, you did have a terrible childhood,” she mutters, almost reading my mind.
“You’re right,” I joke. “Not having some fancy oven was the reason my childhood was stolen from me.”
Pippa throws her head back with laughter. Her hair falls down her back as her entire body shakes with her laugh. “It’s the fact you think the Easy-Bake Oven is fancy.” She looks at me once again. There’s wetness under her eyes, but this time, it’s from laughter. She wipes at her smudged mascara.
The thought occurs to me that I could get used to hearing her laugh more, to seeing her happy tears. And those are both things I shouldn’t want to get used to.
“Is it not?”
“No. It’s terrible. I don’t know how the food that you bake in it is even edible.”
“How was I supposed to know that?”
She takes a long, deep breath in an attempt to calm herself. It’s quiet between us, but a comfortable kind of quiet. The one without expectations to awkwardly fill it.
Eventually, she takes another drink of her coffee with her eyes trained on the view in front of us. In the back of my mind, I still want to find a way to bring people here. To give some of the landscape artists I know the chance to capture the beauty to the best of their abilities.
“So are you going to tell me more about your childhood?” She doesn’t sound timid while asking it. She seems curious, but I also get the sense I could tell her no and she wouldn’t keep prying.
“Doubt it,” I answer honestly. I have a complicated relationship with my parents. As an adult, I can’t fathom treating a child the way they treated me. I could imagine myself having a kid or two if I met the right person, and I can’t imagine just discarding a child the way they discarded me. “All there is to say is that I was their trophy child. Paraded around and appreciated when they wanted to show me off to others but hidden away and forgotten about when there was nobody around to brag to.”
“Did they encourage you to be an artist?”
I take a drink of coffee because her question is a complicated one. They shoved art down my throat from the moment I could hold a pencil, but even from a young age, I rebelled against them. I didn’t want to become them, and every day of my adult life, I wonder if I became everything they hated or everything they wanted me to be.
“Encourage isn’t the word I’d use. Forced is more like it.”
“Something tells me you don’t take well to being forced to do anything.”
I chuckle. I appreciate that she seems to always say exactly what’s on her mind. “You could say that.”
“So you rebelled by becoming an art owner instead of a creator?”
“I rebelled by not ever giving in to their wishes and following in their footsteps. I was supposed to be some nepo baby art prodigy. They wanted me to be that desperately. It’s the one thing I refused to become.”
“So could you have been an art prodigy? Are you any good?”
My lips twitch as I do my best to fight a smirk. “Remember that statue you liked so much in my office?”