Greg Pruitt unfolded the contract on the coffee table, next to a jigsaw puzzle that lay in its box, and for a long moment he looked at the box and then at the page and then at the box again. “Clementine,” he said slowly, “the name on this contract is the name on this puzzle. New England Autumn, four hundred pieces. We did this one at Christmas.” He turned over the lid. There, in the corner, in a small clear script, was my signature, and under it, a barn I had painted in the fall of 1984, behind the Wendell Avenue house, on a sheet of watercolor paper that cost me four dollars. “Five million, six hundred thousand,” he said. “For this?”
Allison was standing in the kitchen doorway with a dish towel in her hands. She is forty three, my only daughter, thin and quick, with the eyes of Walter and a smile that does not go as far up as it used to. She did not come in. “Mom,” she said, very lightly, “that is fantastic. I always said you were talented.” I looked at her over the top of my glasses. “Allison,” I said, “you told me my little hobby was cute. You said that at the Fourth of July. You said it in front of the neighbors.” She laughed, a short, brittle laugh. “I did not mean it that way.” I said, “Honey, there is only one way to mean it.”
I took the paper from my cardigan pocket. It was a list I had made by hand, in pencil, on the back of a church bulletin, over many nights in the guest room. Twenty five payments of thirteen hundred dollars from the nurse downstairs, Brianna. Thirty two thousand, five hundred dollars. She had paid every month by check, to a person she believed was the landlord, and the checks had gone to a bank that was not mine and not Walter. “Brianna came to me in March,” I said. “She thought I would be angry at her. She cried in my kitchen. She said, Mrs. Delaney, I have been paying you rent for two years. I said, Dear, I have not seen a penny.”
A small wooden paint box sat open beside a puzzle on a coffee table and gave one retired art teacher the evening to bring her daughter back to the studio.
Greg looked at his wife. He did not say a word, and it was worse than shouting. Allison, the dish towel twisted in her fists, said that she was going to put it back. She said she had only needed it for a few months. Tuition for her son, a tax bill, the roof. “And a Peloton,” said Greg, quietly. “Allison, I saw the box in the garage. You told me it was a gift from work.” Her mouth shook. “I wanted one thing,” she said, “that was only for me. After twenty years of being the daughter who stays and does all the work, I wanted one nice thing.”
I let that hang in the air, because I wanted her to hear it. Then I said, “Allison, I know. I know what it costs to be the one who stays.” I put the paper down. “When your father was sick, you came every Tuesday. When the furnace broke, you came with a space heater. I never once said thank you, and that was my failure.” She stared at me. I had not planned to say it. “But you do not get to take the money of another person and call it a reward. A woman who works nights in the hospital paid you for a home you had no right to charge for.”
The quitclaim deed was in the drawer of Greg, under the checkbook. He took it out without being asked. It was a short, plain form that would have made Allison and him the owners of the house on Wendell Avenue and left me, at seventy, as a guest in the room I had slept in for thirty eight years. “I had it drawn up in April,” Greg said, in a flat voice. “Allison told me you were forgetting things. She said you would be better off in a place with a nurse.” He tore the deed in half, then in half again. “I want you to see me do it, Clementine.”
So I laid down what would happen, in the voice I used to use on thirty children in the third grade. Allison would repay Brianna in full, with interest, within the year, and she would go to the nurse and say the reason herself. The Peloton would be sold.
The rent on the downstairs would go to an account in the name of Walter and me, and I would send Brianna a receipt on the first of every month, by hand. “And I am keeping my room,” I said. “At no charge. For as long as I live.” Allison nodded, with her face wet. “And I would like,” I said, “for you to come to my studio on Saturday. And paint with me.”
She came. It took her three weeks to arrive, because she needed to be sure, and she stood in the doorway of the little back room with her arms wrapped around herself. I handed her a brush, and a sheet of the cheap paper, and she looked at it as if it might bite. “I have no talent,” she said. “Nobody does,” I said. “You only have a wet brush.” She laughed, and sat, and painted a crooked red barn with a blue sky that ran into the grass. It was awful. I put it on the refrigerator, under the magnet of the Berkshire Museum, and it has been there ever since.
The puzzles went on sale in September. Clementine New England, the box says, in the small clear script. Four hundred paintings, one hundred at a time, the way the company wanted. Brianna bought the first one, in a store in Lenox, and brought it to my door with a bunch of grocery store flowers. We did it on the coffee table, the two of us and Greg, with a pot of coffee, and Walter watching from his chair by the window. Somewhere around the sky, Brianna said, “Mrs. Delaney, do you know that you painted my favorite place in the world?” I said I had no idea. And she pointed at the barn.
