Page 116 of Drawing Home
Ignoring her phone, she ran her pencil along the edge of the paper, shading the background of the final panel. The depth of gray wasn’t coming through, and she realized that the sketch pad the page was resting on wasn’t a hard enough surface. She thought of Henry and his early gift of a drawing board.
“Hey,” her mother called as she came up from behind her. She was dressed in shorts and a bathing suit and had a canvas tote over her shoulder. “I thought you wanted to go to the beach.”
“I can’t go with my leg looking like this. I need another few days.”
Her mother pulled up a chair.
“Mom,” she said. “I’m kind of busy.”
“Oh? What are you working on?”
“My graphic novel. I’m literally finishing the last page.”
The story ended in a way Penny hadn’t expected. She’d thought Queen Bea’s leaving would feel like the vanquishing of a villain, but it felt like just another loss. The last image in the book was Bea’s face in the window of a jitney that was pulling away from Main Street, and it almost made her cry. There had been moments this summer when she’d felt like her life was really beginning, that things had been set in motion with this house. But now everything was going back to the way it had been; she just lived in a fancier place.
One part of the summer she didn’t include in the novel was the stuff with her father. It was too confusing. She hadn’t heard from him very much since the day in court, just a text here or there checking in withHow’s it going, kiddo?She didn’t even know if he was still in town. She tried not to care.
“You know,” Penny said slowly, “when Dad first showed up this summer, I thought,Okay, I’m going to have a father around.But the more time I spent with him, the less he felt like one.”
Her mother sighed loudly. “I’m sorry, hon. But try to look at it like this: There’s the family you’re born into, and the family you create along the way. Sometimes that second family is even better.”
“Like Angus?”
“Yes. Exactly. Like Angus. And as you go forward in your life, there might be other people who play important roles. Would it be nice to have a perfect family? Sure. But it’s also nice to have room for the other people.”
Penny had never voiced it to herself that way, not exactly, but yes—there were times when she wished for a perfect family. Or at least a regular family. It was the same nagging feeling she had at therapy:Why can’t I be normal?And then the house had happened, and she thought,Okay, I might not have normal, but I can have special. She understood now it was more complicated than that.
“So,” her mom said with a smile, “when do I get to read that?”
“My graphic novel? Whenever you want. This is just the ending. You have to get the rest of it back from Bea.”
Her mother looked surprised. “What’s Bea doing with it?”
Penny told her about the contest and how she’d wanted Bea’s opinion on what drawings she should submit. And then Bea kept asking to see more of the panels. “I have to get the rest of the book back from her anyway so I can add this part,” Penny said.
“I’m really proud of you for starting and finishing such a big project. Just think, at the beginning of the summer, you were having trouble completing even one drawing. After Henry died, you felt like you wouldn’t be able to draw again. And now look at you!”
Penny nodded, trying to muster the enthusiasm to match her mother’s.
“You don’t seem very excited about it.”
Penny shrugged. “I thought getting the house and Bea leaving would be the happy ending. But now that it’s here, it doesn’t feel that way.”
Emma climbed the stairs to the master bedroom Bea had so audaciously claimed for herself at the start of the summer. The truth was, Emma probably wouldn’t have been comfortable sleeping so far from Penny, not after all the years of their bedrooms being just a few feet away from each other.
She’d barely explored this separate, more private wing of the house. She peeked into the office and the library and thought it really would be a perfect suite for Angus if he’d stop being so stubborn and agree to move in. “The house isn’t the enemy,” she’d told him. But she was starting to suspect it had nothing to do with the house. The house was just an excuse. Angus might simply be ready to move on.
The bedroom door was ajar. Bea had set a garment rack next to the bed, and it was packed with clothes from end to end. Emma rapped on the door frame.
“Bea? I need to talk to you for a minute.”
She didn’t wait for an invitation. Bea sat on the bed folding her scarf collection. Emma stepped around the garment rack, noting the half-filled suitcases on the floor. “Bea, I haven’t had the chance to thank you for sharing Henry’s book with me,” Emma said. That wasn’t exactly true; it wasn’t so much a lack of opportunity as it was a hurdle to get over her anger at the Mark situation. “Those drawings of my father are priceless.”
“Yes, well, I feel that way about all of Henry’s work,” Bea said. “But I imagined you might appreciate those images.”
Emma’s mind had turned to Henry Wyatt many times over the past few weeks; she was still grappling with the odd but incredible gesture he’d made in gifting the house to Penny. The memoir did little to make sense of any of it. It actually made her more perplexed. She hadn’t known his years in Sag Harbor dated all the way back to her childhood. Why had he never mentioned that he’d spent time with her father? Why didn’t he show her the drawings he’d done of him? Or, if not her, why didn’t he at least show them to Penny? Was talking about his friendship with her father somehow too personal for Henry? It seemed, from the memoir, to have affected him deeply. Maybe Henry dealt with emotions only through his art.
“Why do you think he never showed me himself?” Emma asked. “Or at least said, ‘Hey, I knew your dad’? Or even told Penny he knew her grandfather?”
