Page 71 of Seven Summer Weekends

Addison was surprised when she woke up feeling even sadder than she’d felt the day before. She hadn’t slept well and had barely eaten since Ben left—she found it tough to swallow.

After dragging out the recycling, Addison went for a long beach walk, hoping to clear her head in the beauty of it all. There was a light mist coming off the ocean. It was too early for the throngs of homeowners and day-trippers to have set up their chairs in purposeful configurations. The mornings belonged to the beach walkers and the anglers and the dogs. She walked for a couple of miles, stepping in and out of the ocean and watching the sandpipers scurry back and forth in the foamy surf. It was really something.

“The Walrus and the Carpenter,” the Lewis Carroll poem she had been tasked with memorizing in the sixth grade, played on repeat in her head, providing relief from her thoughts and quandaries.The mind is funny that way, she thought, reflecting that sometimes a song or a poem gets stuck in your head for no reason but to take up room and allow your brain to rest. She couldn’t remember her Amazon password but could still recall every word of the humorous verse fromThrough the Looking-Glassabout two old friends taking a walk on the beach, weeping to see such quantities of sand.

“If seven maids with seven mops Swept it for half a year, Do you suppose,” the Walrus said, “That they could get it clear?”

“I doubt it,” said the Carpenter, And shed a bitter tear.

When Addison arrived back at her block, a record-breaking (for her) two hours later, Sally came running toward her onto the beach. Addison’s heart jumped from her chest at the sight of her. It sank, just as quickly, when she spotted Shep following a few steps behind.

“Have you heard from Ben?” she asked at his approach. She couldn’t help herself.

“No. But it’s not the first time he has wandered off.”

Her face said it all. He cut to the chase.

“You seem like a nice girl,” Shep said kindly. “At first, I was all in on this love connection, but now—maybe he is too broken?”

Addison shrugged. She had certainly never wanted a broken guy before. She could accept the offer on the house today, clean out the place by Sunday, and never look back.

Sally took off after a seagull, prompting Shep to chase after her.

“I’m sorry, Addie,” he said as he jogged off.

“It’s Addison,” she said to no one.

She typed a message to the real estate agent.

Counter with whatever you think is right.

It was met with a thumbs-up emoji.

She followed it with a text to Kizzy.

Anything on the job front? September is coming quickly.

Kizzy wrote back right away.

I was about to reach out! Word is Ogilvy is looking for fresh blood. Should I set up an interview?

Now Addison gave the thumbs-up.

Two thumbs up on my new life plan, she thought. Both prospects should have made her smile. They didn’t. She was miserable. Possibly more miserable than she had ever been.

She went to the studio and continued molding abstract shapes and attaching them to the piece she was now callingUtter Confusion.

At around three in the morning, it felt done. She left it to dry.

Too exhausted to think, she fell asleep quickly that night and woke the next morning withUtter Confusioncalling out to her. It had been so long since she had that yearning to make something with her hands—even longer since she had felt the pull of creativity calling her back to a piece she was working on. She didn’t have that same draw at work. Yes, she was proud of many of her ad campaigns over the years, but those collaborative efforts felt very different from this. She remembered the feeling from college, remembered skipping parties when a piece she was working on had total control over her. She poured herself a bowl of cereal and ate it while staring down her creation, taking it all in before choosing the colors to paint it with.

Gicky had a nice selection of glazes arranged by shade along the shelves of an antique corner cupboard. Addie opened each jar to see which were dried up and which were fresh. She mostly leaned into the more muted colors, blues with names like Dawn and Isle and Yonder, Lettuce Green, Green Thumb, and one vibrant and shocking tangerine. She took her time with each section of the sculpture, only stopping to eat a second bowl of cereal and to use the bathroom. It was nearly midnight when she was done.

Despite the hour, Addison couldn’t wait to fire up the kiln. She gingerly placed her piece in the center and closed the lid. She set the timer for noon the next day and nervously went to sleep.

Chapter Thirty-three

Addison paced back and forth at the Saturday morning ferry, waiting for the gallery owner and her entourage to arrive. She was nervous about meeting the illustrious CC Ng, her aunt’s contemporary and longtime friend, and the proprietor of the CC Ng Gallery. CC was about as innovative and well respected as they come in the art world. She had opened her first gallery on Prince Street in 1970, a few years before the sketchy downtown neighborhood south of Houston Street was rebranded as SoHo. It soon became evident that CC had an infallible eye not just for what was beautiful, but for what was marketable. By the eighties she had expanded into the space next door, and in the nineties, CC moved her gallery, ahead of the curve, to a fabulous ten-thousand-square-foot space in Chelsea. The CC Ng Gallery had been thriving there ever since.

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