Page 22 of Drawing Home
Thinking about it now, Penny sobbed, her tears soaking the blank piece of paper in front of her. Another thing Henry always said was that a blank piece of paper was just a drawing waiting to be completed. But it was so hard to draw now that he was gone.
“Knock, knock,” her mother said, rapping once before opening the bedroom door. Penny quickly wiped her eyes but it was no use trying to hide anything from her mother. “Are you crying?”
Her mother sat on the edge of her bed and reached out to hug her, but Penny pulled away.
“What’s wrong, hon?”
Penny shrugged, and she saw her mother’s face tense. It was herI don’t have time to deal with your nervous breakdownlook.
“Angus is leaving soon for the historical society. You’re supposed to start helping out there this week.”
“Ugh! It’s so boring.”
“Penny, our family has been part of this town for hundreds of years. Your ancestors helped defend Sag Harbor against the British during the Revolutionary War. We’re lucky the history of this town is being preserved. When you’re old enough to get a paying job, you can find another way to spend your summers. But for now, this is what you’re doing.”
“What about the house?”
Her mother inhaled deeply. “Nothing is changing for now. We need to just continue with our normal lives. Let me worry about the house.”
“I want to live there.”
Emma shook her head. “Big and fancy isn’t always better, you know. We’re lucky to have this place so close to town. We’ve been here since you were three.”
“Yeah, but we rent it. It’s not ours.”
“No, the property technically is not ours. But it is our home. And it upsets me to think you feel it somehow isn’t good enough. That…mansion has nothing to do with normal people like us.”
“Is this because of the old woman? Is she telling you we can’t live there?”
“This has nothing to do with anyone, Penny. It’s my feeling about what’s best for our family and how we live our lives.”
“Henry wanted me to have it. Why are you getting in the way? You always say no to things, and then you wonder why I’m so unhappy!” She looked down at the blank sheet of paper on her lap, warped and ruined by her tears.
Emma preferred to cut flowers late in the day—it was one of the small things that extended their vase life. But she wanted to bring a bunch to the hotel to set in the lobby. It made her happy to look across the room and see her own yellow New Day hybrid teas and her white Iceberg floribunda. Jack appreciated it too. He said her flowers lasted days longer than the blooms he bought weekly from the florist. Again, her mother’s expertise guided her. It was all in the attention to detail: selecting the flowers at the right stage, clipping at the optimal time of day, when the stem had food reserves, cutting at a forty-five-degree angle, and then immediately putting them in water.
Emma set a bucket of fresh water on the ground and cut the flowers whose petals were unfolding. She placed each stem in the bucket. When she ran out of open blooms, she felt around the closed buds, squeezing a few to see if any were soft enough that they would open in the vase.
The sound of a buzz saw next door irritated her. She glanced over the hedge into her neighbor Ken Cutty’s backyard. It had been Angus and Celia’s home before Celia died, and they had been much better neighbors. Lately, Ken had been piling a lot of lumber in the yard. A discarded refrigerator was out there too, along with a few iron drums whose purpose she couldn’t identify. The place was an eyesore.
Angus came out onto the back porch. “Is Penny coming with me to work?”
“She’s going to bike over.”
“I can drive her. Leaving in an hour.”
“I think she wants to be able to come and go on her own,” Emma said apologetically.
Emma wondered for the millionth time why Angus turned her into an approval-seeking adolescent. She knew that, from a psychology standpoint, it was because she’d lost her father at such a young age. From any older male figure Emma knew, she found herself looking for either guidance or validation. It had been this way her entire life.
She was also painfully aware that, just as she had been raised by a single mother, history was now repeating itself. Though in some ways, she felt her daughter’s situation was worse than her own had been. Her father’s sudden death when she was still in elementary school had been devastating. But up until that point, Tom Kirkland had been a pretty great dad to Emma. Penny had never experienced a normal, day-to-day life with her father.
That was partly why she liked having Angus around. Aside from the logistics of having another adult to help out, she wanted some sort of male figure for Penny.
“This house thing is complicated,” Emma said, moving her bucket of clipped roses out of the sun. She looked at him. “You haven’t really weighed in. Why?”
“Celia always said I had a way of not talking to her when she wanted to talk, then trying to press her into talking when she needed space. I try to correct that whenever I can.”
Angus had a sonorous voice, and it made everything he said seem wise. Emma nodded. “I’d like your opinion.”
