TWENTY-SIX

By the time I got home that afternoon, my feathers were ruffled enough that I decided to confront Mama. I deserved to know more about my own daddy. I’d been respectful of her needs the whole time we lived in Georgia and hadn’t pushed when she shushed my questions. Now we were in Vermont. The rules were different. But she wasn’t home. Neither was Deacon. He was at the store and I was agitated enough that I didn’t want to go help him. I wanted to help myself.

I threw my backpack on the porch, crossed the yard, went inside the barn, and climbed the stairs to the second floor. Two big doors in front of the landing had been pinned open ever since I got to Vermont. Deacon said the loft was used to store hay, back when the farm had working horses. They had cut it in the fields, then used a pulley to haul each bale up through the opening, and fed it to the horses all winter.

Outside those doors, blue sky pushed gray-ridged clouds swiftly away. Past the trees lining our road, blocks of wheat-colored fields—bordered by crimson, orange, and green—made the earth look like a patchwork quilt. In the distance, two red silos dotted the view, and even farther out I could see the blue sliver of a lake.

I could have stayed right there and looked at that view until the sun set, but I was on a mission. I hadn’t seen my ancestor portraits since the day Deacon and I carried them out of the house, and I wanted to sit with them. They belonged to me. Not just the portraits, but the people. They were all I had left of my real family. No matter how close I ever got to the Parkers, I’d never really be one of them.

Partway around the walkway was a door that opened to a dark room. I reached in and flipped the light switch on the wall. Boxes with Austin Ancestor Portraits written in black marker sat in the middle of the floor. They were taped shut across the top.

More boxes, the same shape and size, were stacked in rows behind them. The tape across the first one had peeled off and fallen to one side. I carefully stripped it away, reached into a thousand pink Styrofoam peanuts, and lifted out a framed landscape with his signature across the bottom. Johnny Austin.

Styrofoam flew everywhere. Little balls stuck to my jeans, blew across the floor, and clung to the canvas. I carried the landscape to the light in front of the open doors and held it up. It was exactly the same as the scene outside. He’d painted the view from the second floor of that barn—the rolling hills, the two silos, even the strip of blue water in the distance.

I don’t know much about art, but I could tell his was different. Something about the colors not being too bright, and the way light shone so everything on one side looked soft. Not in a Hallmark card kind of way, in a real way, like an invitation to step inside the scene. I turned it over. On the back it said The Georgia View.

All the other boxes were taped up tight, and labeled on the side like this:

JA/Vermont Draft Horses and Sleigh;

JA/Flooded Covered Bridge;

JA/Birches;

JA/Sugaring Done the Old Way.

No mention of a magnolia. Not one. What were Aspen and Jane talking about?

I shoved the boxes back in place, chased Styrofoam peanuts across the floor, and went in search of a trash can to hide them. Technically, everything in this barn was mine. I should be allowed up here, but it felt like snooping. No need for a piece of Styrofoam to give me away.

In the corner, an olive-green tarp lay over something that could have been a trash bin. I lifted the corner and peeked, hoping it wasn’t home to a bunch of bats or something equally creepy. Underneath the tarp was a wooden crate, sectioned inside by slats of wood that protected a series of unframed canvases. Carefully, I pulled one out and leaned it against the wall. My breath caught. This was nothing like the landscapes. This canvas was painted in deep shades of navy and plum, chocolate, evergreen, and a smoky pink. The dense background was broken up only by the image of a small girl in a white dress running beneath a tree that had thick, shiny leaves on branches loaded with cups of creamy magnolia blooms.

There were seven canvases total. They were all almost the same: a magnolia tree, a dark background, and a girl who looked slightly older with each one. The last one was unfinished, with smudges of the dark colors and a few magnolia blooms at the top. Underneath the flowers was the outline of a tall, faceless girl running with her arms stretched out and palms up.

Purple lights darted past my eyes. I put a hand to the wall to steady myself, and his voice was there again.

“I’m going to paint you, Magnolia Grace,” he’d said. “One portrait every year.” I hadn’t wanted to stay still for him, so he’d moved his canvas and paints and brushes outside next to the barn where I could run around and play in the grass while he tried to capture my image. He’d made me laugh so hard I ended up with a tummy ache. Later, he’d rocked me to sleep, my cheek pressed firmly against his sweat-stained T-shirt, the sound of his heart beating in my ear.

With shaky hands, I carefully placed each canvas back into its slot, covered the crate with the tarp, and slipped out the door. Sprinting across the yard, I grabbed my backpack from the porch, bolted upstairs, and locked myself in my bedroom. The photo of me and my daddy on the carousel was still tucked inside my copy of Charlotte’s Web, where it had lived for over six years. I held it by one corner and lay flat on my back, studying the image. The need to confront Mama was gone. Everything I wanted to know at that moment, I’d seen in the magnolia paintings. And for the first time I could ever remember, I missed him.