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Ever since that afternoon, Derek would find Anne drawing some scene somewhere on the beach. It never took him more than fifteen minutes to spot her; it was almost as if she wasn’t hiding from him.
Day in and day out, he found himself curious about the introverted artist and whatever she had been drawing that day. All it would take for him to leave Anne alone would be for her to tell him to go away. Instead, she would move over and invite him to sit down.
“These are very good,” he complimented her after looking at a drawing of a beach volleyball game one morning.
“It’s nothing,” Anne dismissed, trying to snatch the sketchbook from his hands.
“Be quiet,” he nudged her with his shoulder. “This is excellent work! You managed to capture the motion of the game even in this tableau...”
“Tableau?” she asked, confused why he’d use that particular word.
Rolling his eyes, he typed the word into his phone and held up the definition.
“A group of models or motionless figures representing a scene from a story or from history,” she read aloud with an eye roll. “I know that. My art teacher calls it a living picture. Why didn’t you just call it that?”
“But it isn’t really a living picture.”
“But it kind of is,” Anne protested. “I recreated the scene from an actual volleyball game. A player made every single one of these motions. Somebody spiked the ball. Somebody stood there with her hands on her hips as if she really didn’t want to play but was because her friends were. There was the girl that kept trying to get the guys’ attention, but they were all so competitive that they were paying more attention to the...”
Derek interrupted her by laughing.
“What?”
“Those guys knew that somebody was trying to get their attention. They were showing off most likely. How often did somebody spike a ball?”
“Several times,” she blinked.
“They were being competitive not only because they wanted to win. They wanted to show off. Because they were very much aware that there was a handful of pretty girls among them.” Grinning at her. “Which girl won?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, you have the girl standing there pouting,” he pointed to a spot on the drawing. “There’s the girl flirting,” he pointed to another spot. “But right there,” he pointed towards one of the few girls that had been active participants in the game, “is somebody actually playing.”
“Oh.” Anne pulled back. “I wasn’t paying attention,” she admitted. “I was too busy drawing.”
Shaking his head, Derek flipped to the next scene in the sketchbook. “Tell me about this one.”
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“Tell me about your sisters,” Derek asked her a few days later as they walked around the beach a few weeks later.
“What do you want to know about them?”
“Whatever you want to tell me,” he admitted. “I saw your sketches of them in your book. They can’t really be like that.”
Smiling sadly, Anne recalled the sketch she had done of Beth in an attempt to calm down after a particularly uncomfortable conversation shortly before she left for the trip. She’d drawn Beth as a Stepford Wife wearing a 50’s style dress and pearls with a mess around her.
“You would be surprised,” Anne finally commented. “We’re almost stairsteps. Two years and two months apart, except Mary and me. We’re two years and almost four months apart. We had a younger brother, Walter was almost exactly two years younger than Mary.”
Glancing over at her, Derek gently squeezed her hand.
Squeezing back, she drew in a slow breath. “He was four years old when he got sick. Cancer. Apparently, it runs in the family on Mama’s side,” she whispered. “Mary took it harder than the rest of us. He was our father’s favorite and Mary was quick to learn that if she hung around Walter then she would get attention as well.”
“And after Walter...” he couldn’t finish that sentence.
“Mary learned that if she had an earache or a stomachache or some other illness, then Mama would get worried and pay attention to her. She’d be cuddled and loved on and... and after Walter,..” Anne struggled to finish that sentence. “She was no longer a middle child and became the baby of the family again. She was doted on way too much.”
That explained the drawing of Mary she had done where a teenage Mary was throwing a tantrum like a child with broken dishes scattered around her. She had drawn it after Mary had thrown a fit after being asked to put the supper dishes in the empty dishwasher. There may have been some thrown plates as well.
“And Beth?”
Shaking her head, Anne tried to figure out where to begin. Finally, “We have a cousin,” she started. “He’s really our adopted cousin. My Uncle Warren and his wife couldn’t have children but really wanted one, so they adopted William Walter as a newborn. Named him after our grandfather and my father. Will...” she struggled to say, “was charming and Beth had the biggest crush on him.”
“But he’s your cousin.”
Shrugging, she repeated Beth’s excuse while rolling her eyes. “He’s adopted.”
Shaking his head, Derek couldn’t figure out if he could accept that reasoning or if it was still weird.
“It’s weird,” Anne correctly interpreted his look. “Will might not be a blood relation, but legally he is our cousin.” Shrugging the shoulder of the hand he wasn’t holding, she added, “But my sister didn’t care. She enrolled in the same college as him – they are the same age – and kept chasing after him on campus. Last year she found out that he had transferred to a school with a better pre-med program. She dropped out shortly after that and has been living at home ever since.”
Shaking her head, she admitted, “I could understand it better if she was job hunting, or working from home, but Father let her withdraw her entire college fund and spend it however she wanted. Mother advised him against it, but after our brother died, Elizabeth became Father’s favorite. He...” Anne started to giggle at the absurdity, “...he sees himself in Elizabeth even though she looks more like Mama than she looks like him. But she has a brilliant financial mind. If she had continued with her degree, she could have been a successful investment banker or something like that. Instead, she spends her time in front of the mirror taming her curls and applying make-up thick enough to form a mask that can hide every single one of her external flaws.”
Derek caught her word usage. “It can’t be that bad.”
Rolling her eyes, Anne didn’t even look at him as she answered, “We’re all just so different.” Shaking her head, she added, “And I wish they would do more around the house and not just make me and Mama deal with it.”
“Why do you do it?”
“Somebody has to. I know that I’m not doing them any favors, but I can’t just sit there and let the dirty dishes pile up when Mama is feeling miserable after a round of chemo.”
“You do like to get things done,” he pointed out, leaning down to give her a quick kiss on the lips.
Pulling back, Derek realized Anne might not react very well to his impulsive action. He should have asked first before reacting impulsively. With the apology on his tongue, he was surprised when Anne kissed him back instead of bopping him on the head with her sketchbook.
After that, the pair were rarely apart.
