Ava found some cold cuts in the refrigerator and a loaf of sliced bread.
As she assembled two sandwiches, with mayo and coarse mustard, she heard Lane go through to the dining room and open a drawer, then shuffle back to her studio. As soon as she had a chance, Ava would find the gun. Lane said it was fake but it looked real. She’d been around guns since she was little. Her dad, a farmer and hunter, had taught her gun safety, then taught her how to shoot rifles, shotguns, and his pistol. He had been a sweet, dutiful, modest man. A good father, before they lost the farm. Her mother said he couldn’t live without the land, he died of a broken heart. But really, it was an accident. He’d been drinking, the gun went off. Their old neighbors found him in his truck, parked at the old place, facing the rows of last year’s soy crop.
Ava brought the plates to the table and went to get Lane.
“Lunch is ready,” Ava said. “I fixed you a sandwich.”
Lane closed her sketchbook and carried it with her to the kitchen. They sat down to eat.
“Am I going to stay here?” Ava said. “Like, live here and go to school and everything?”
Lane studied the girl. “What about your father?”
“My mom didn’t tell you?”
“What?”
“He died. Five years ago.”
Lane absorbed this for a moment. She knew that. Of course she had known it. She’d simply had no reason to think about it before now. “His family?”
Ava shrugged. “They’re all gone,” she said. Her father, an only child, had inherited the farm when his parents died, before she was born.
“There’s no one in, what is it? Iowa?”
“No.”
“Well, we’ll see,” Lane said.
“What do kids around here do in the summer?” Ava asked.
The question caught Lane off guard. It was not something she’d considered before.
“I might be the wrong one to ask,” Lane said. “Seeing as how I’m an old lady.”
Then she smiled at Ava, and Ava saw her mother in the smile. Encouraged, Ava said, “At first I thought Oliver lived with you.”
This made Lane laugh. “Oh, lordy. That’s the last thing I need. I’m lucky to get rid of that boy at the end of the day.”
He was definitely not a boy, he was probably as old as Kaitlyn, Ava thought. And he sure was drunk a lot. But he had known where to take her, what to do. Lane didn’t seem to know anything.
“When does he come back?” Ava said.
“Monday,” Lane said. “He’ll bring in some materials for me, and some lunch. And he usually sticks around to deal with paperwork, financial things.”
“Financial things?”
“He pays the bills, the taxes, does the checkbook.”
“Why? I mean, why don’t you do it?” Ava asked. Her mother paid her own bills and filed her own taxes. She had taught Ava how to be careful and smart about money. Ava had assumed all adults were this way.
“I’m too busy,” Lane said. “Was never much of a math person anyway.”
“I like math,” Ava said.
“Your mother was good at math. She got straight A’s all the way through.”
“Yeah, I know,” Ava said. A million questions welled in her. What was her mom like back then? Why didn’t Lane ever come visit them? What was she carrying around that gun for? Instead, Ava pointed to the sketchbook on the table and said, “What’s that?”
Lane showed her. As Ava flipped through the book, Lane explained her project. Some pages contained scribbled notes: dimensions, distances, lengths of doors and windows. Dollar amounts for time and materials, schedules, notes about lighting. Some pages had photographs taped in.
“That’s the street outside the building,” Lane said. “When they finish, that will be the view through the window. See this house? It was built in 1820, one of the first ones in the neighborhood.”
Other materials were tucked in between the pages. Diagrams of old-fashioned garments, maps, carriages, horses, birds.
Ava was surprised to see how similar Lane’s handwriting was to Louise’s and her own. It gave her a momentary sense of comfort, followed by panging melancholy. Like her grandmother’s smile, seeing the handwriting left her lonely and unsettled. Lane was still talking about the restaurant, her research, the history of the neighborhood that she had been studying. Ava turned another page and the sketches began.
“Oh,” Ava said.
Her mother could draw, but not like this: both gestural and precise, with a freshness and energy that rendered the subjects more real than a photograph. The sketches were quick, unpolished, executed in ordinary pencil, often unfinished at one corner, their incompleteness the only thing that called attention to their artifice.
Ava had formed the impression that her grandmother was crazy and also perhaps a criminal of some sort. She was startled, now, to see that Lane was brilliant.
“They’re amazing,” Ava said. “I had no idea.”
“She never talked about me, did she? I always suspected as much.”
Ava kept turning pages, each graced with achingly lovely images: buildings, their minute architectural details suggested by a few rough lines. Figures. Women in long dresses and bonnets, men in old-fashioned suits, children and dogs and birds and trees. Ava had never seen anything like it.
Lane was explaining what the finished painting was going to look like, listing the details she still had to figure out. It struck Ava as an incredible extravagance that the sketches were for something else. They were perfect already. She turned a page and next to a half-finished rendering of a magnolia flower she saw the words. Louise is dead.
Lane stood over the sink rinsing plates when Ava closed the book.
“Done with that?” Lane said. “I’ve got to get to work. Try not to make too much noise.”
“I won’t,” Ava said.
Lane took the sketchbook and her pipe back to her studio. Ava dried their lunch dishes and stacked everything neatly on the shelves. The house was silent. Ava crept through to the dining room, opening drawers and cabinets. She found the gun in the large marble-topped buffet and picked it up. It was heavy, definitely real. She checked the chamber. Loaded. Why would anyone need a loaded gun in the middle of a city? It didn’t make sense, what was there to shoot?
She carried it to the costume room, unloaded it, and hid the bullets and the pistol in separate pockets of a gingham dress with a frilly smock and bonnet—some sort of pioneer girl outfit. She wasn’t crazy about hiding Lane’s gun from her, but nobody should point a loaded gun at their granddaughter. Ava didn’t want it to happen again. She hoped Lane wouldn’t get mad.
Afraid to bother her grandmother, Ava went outside. She walked past old houses, their windows of rippling glass, air-conditioning units humming in the side yards. Messy banana trees and crape myrtles dominated the small lots, overflowing their fences. It was lush and green like Iowa in late summer, but this vegetation was unfamiliar to her.
She came upon a park a couple of blocks away. A paved trail circled the park’s perimeter, congested by dog walkers, people exercising, an old man shuffling along with a cigar. She crossed the path and walked on the grass, past families with small children, toddlers chasing ducks along a lake. Overhead huge oak tree branches met and formed a canopy, their roots bucking out of the ground. Ava wandered along, staying in the shade of the large trees. Even here she noticed garbage everywhere. Takeout containers, empty beer cans and cigarette butts.
Some peewee soccer teams were practicing in the fields, and a family gathered around a grill, cooking some meat. Nearby a girl of eight or nine sat erect on top of a horse. Ava kicked her way along the sidewalk above the cypress trees growing out of the water, until they thinned out and she could see the other bank, the cranes and barges across the waterway. The Mississippi formed the eastern edge of Iowa, they’d been there on a field trip last year, to Dubuque, where they’d learned about the old industrialists who’d built their mansions above the river, at the top of the bluff. It seemed impossible that anything from that place could touch this one.
She turned away from the bank and walked back through a different part of the park. She came upon a broad green space that had the biggest tree she’d ever seen. It must have been hundreds of years old. Some of its branches rested on the ground. Its gnarled roots twisted out of the earth as high as her waist. Ava climbed up one of the roots and rested against the trunk. In the distance, runners bounced past in their neon gear, and beyond that, cars on the street, their reflective surfaces glaring.
The tree’s massive canopy created its own sense of space, a different energy, detached from the pace of the street. Ava breathed it in. Her mother might have come to this tree. She could have sat in this exact spot when she was Ava’s age. For the first time Ava found it possible to imagine her mother in the city. She stayed in the park for the rest of the afternoon.