Page 104 of Drawing Home
The following pages depicted Henry’s newfound love affair with country living: Henry in the woods, Henry fishing with the bartender, Henry grilling over an open flame in a backyard. In one frame, Henry meets a pigtailed little girl visiting the hotel. Emma Mapson. EmmaKirkland.
Tom Kirkland. Emma. Penny. Three generations of a family. Maybe the embodiment of some sort of ideal Henry had in his mind? Henry made sure there was no doubt about what this period in his life meant to him. Unlike the black, white, and gray sketches in the beginning of the book, these were in color.
Bea closed the volume. How foolish, how sappy, to have felt even for a moment that this book was any kind of tribute to their relationship. She had, in the end, been nothing more than a work partner to him. And then he’d decided midlife that work was no longer important.
Of course he had not left the house to her. She had rejected him romantically, and it did not matter that she did it to protect their working relationship, because in the end he himself rejected the work. Ultimately, his deepest happiness had come from the life he’d made without her.
Bea’s breath caught in her throat and she suddenly felt more alone than she’d ever felt. Had she wasted the past few decades? What was art, in the end, if it didn’t translate into something beautiful in real life?
She wanted to hurl the book across the rotunda. Perhaps she would. But first she had to finish it, no matter how painful.
In the last quarter of the book, Henry returned again to black-and-white images. Tom Kirkland died; his funeral was mapped out in somber, sparse panels. And then Bea’s visit to Windsong.
Her heart began to pound. He had remembered, and rendered exactly, a Ralph Lauren dress she’d worn during the trip. The question was, had he remembered the conversation they had the night sitting by the fire? The answer, spelled out in the dialogue bubbles, was decidedly yes.
He re-created, almost word for word the way she remembered it, their discussion about a future Henry Wyatt museum. Here was proof about his intentions for the house, for his work!
Disappointingly, that scene was her last appearance in the book. It was followed by drawings of Henry in solitude and at the hotel bar, sketching on cocktail napkins. His work had literally become disposable to him. And then, meeting Penny:Emma’s kid. I see the resemblance.Their drawing lessons:Every blank piece of paper is just a drawing waiting to be completed.
All she could think about was the dialogue about the museum. Impatient for more validation, she flipped impatiently to the end of the book. But instead of finding more evidence that Henry had intended Bea to act as the steward of his legacy, she was confronted with half a dozen blank pages. Well, not completely blank. They seemed to be rooms at Windsong, but without any people or furniture in them. And then a blank page.
She sat still, her heart pounding and her stomach tight. Slowly, she flipped back a few pages to a scene of Henry with Penny bent over a drawing board.Every blank piece of paper is a drawing waiting to be completed.
Was this book finished? Or had he left it for someone else to fill in the blanks?
Bea packed the memoir in her bag. It felt heavy as lead. She walked slowly down the winding stairs to the checkout desk.
Chapter Forty-Three
With the court date looming on her calendar, Emma saw the auction planning as a welcome distraction. Really, what she wouldn’t have given for a twelve-hour shift at the hotel. But short of that, the endless details for the auction soaked up enough of her time to keep her sane. And yet, it was evident that Bea could easily have coordinated the entire event on her own. The woman’s organization and imagination were tireless. Emma had to force herself to take charge of something.
“Fine,” Bea said, relenting. “You deal with the party yacht. I don’t care how the guests get here. I’ll just make sure it all works when they arrive.”
After wrangling over logistics with the dockmaster, Emma was finally able to hire Cole Hopkins to transport guests from the marina to Windsong in his 142-foot dinner yacht, theGreat Blue.Cheryl Meister convinced the party who’d already booked him for that date to reschedule their plan for the boat, writing them a hefty check for their inconvenience. Now all Emma had to do was a quick walk-through with Cole.
“This looks so wonderful! The guests might not want to leave for the auction,” Emma said, standing on the sundeck outside a glass-enclosed atrium. She was only half joking. She followed him down to the lower deck, which featured a swimming platform at the stern and housed the engine room and crew quarters. The main level had a sheltered exterior deck leading into the dining room and galley; the upper deck had an outdoor dining space and a sky lounge.
“My concern is making sure I have adequate crew,” Cole said. “How many are you expecting?”
“I think we’ll be at capacity. One hundred and fifty.”
He nodded. “Aside from Louise, I’ll have an engineer and a few deckhands. The catering staff is your hire.”
“I’m working on that. I’ll make sure you’re well covered.”
He led her back up to the sky lounge, and she mapped out where the guests would have drinks and hors d’oeuvres. She pulled out her phone to calculate some budget items, signed the last of the paperwork, and disembarked feeling pretty good about everything.
She stood on the dock for a minute, blinking against the bright sun, looking to see if Sean was around to give her a lift back to Windsong. Instead, she spotted Kyle working on someone’s boat, sanding with a giant planer, his T-shirt soaked through with sweat. Totally focused on what he was doing, he didn’t notice her until she was close enough to climb on board.
“Hey! How’s it going?” she shouted over the grinding of the machine.
He looked up, nodded, then went back to what he was doing.
Okay. She pushed back her feelings of rejection. Hadn’t she told him she needed space?
So why did it feel so bad?
Angus rang the doorbell at Windsong just after two in the afternoon to drop off the last of the boxes from Emma’s Mount Misery house. He was thoughtful enough to call ahead so Bea was expecting him.
