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of rain. A busy kitchen.
    “I like this.”
    Dez had used a narrow color range and soft-focus effects to convey the moody atmosphere of rain and twilight on the common, working ateliminating detail—trying instead to
distill
, to convey tone by letting the dark colors impose some compositional authority on the softer hues.
    “You want to look and look,” Abby said. “I’m not sure why.”
    “I know when my paintings are right,” Dez admitted, even though she knew she risked sounding silly, or full of herself, “when I can look at them and ache with a kind of wonderful memory I can’t quite place.”
    “I know what you mean.” Abby studied it again before sliding it back into its rack. “Oh, I like this, too!” She pulled out one of the abstracted drowning studies that Dez had turned into a narrow, claustrophobia-inducing painting. “And this!”
Spanish Flu, 1918,
a small, square study of sturdy Rose, head bent, tending to Dez’s mother and brother. The three figures were dark and shadowy, much like her memory of that time, the flu itself a static of eerie yellow air. A burst of vermilion, off-center, suggested a bedside spray of roses.
    “Are you doing this kind of thing all the time? Such range. Good work, my dear.”
    “I’m trying. I suppose I’d like more portrait work, to bring in money, but—maybe I’m lucky times are so hard, and I live where I do. If I had nothing but portraits to do, I might get too caught up in them.”
    “We should all be so lucky.”
    “I mean it.”
    “I don’t follow you.”
    “I’m afraid I’d find them too safe, too much of an easy trade for myself, especially now that I’m a wife.”
    Abby smiled with approval. “Right. You’d be able to keep yourself so busy you wouldn’t have time to dig into what you want to say, and because you were so busy, you’d fool yourself into thinking you were getting an awful lot done.”
    “Exactly.” Here was the Abby she had missed.
    “So this is it,” Abby said, lifting down Portia’s casket to inspect it, to turn it over in her hands and hold it to her ear and shake it. “Doesn’t it drive you mad? I’d want to peek.”
    “Sometimes. Sometimes I don’t think I can wait. But it’s doing whathe meant it to do—remind me I have to reopen someday. And keep painting these portraits when I can get the work. Save what I can.”

    In the kitchen, Dez perked coffee and sliced the last of the corned ham for sandwiches. She set down their two plates, and Abby regarded her solemnly, red-lacquered fingertips poised on the coffee mug.
    “So what happened?” she asked, one hand gesturing to include everything, her dark eyes too scrutinizing. “You were the one who won the Cabot Prize. You got that write-up in the
Evening Transcript
! You’re doing some wonderful painting but it doesn’t look like you’re doing a whole lot of it.”
    “I work every morning. And those red fingernails don’t look like you do much painting yourself.”
    “We’re talking about you. You always talked about Cascade this, Cascade that. And it’s obvious Cascade is old news now—”
    “It’s different in summer. Or it was. And it will be again.” She wanted it so desperately: the theater lobby filled, on play nights, with New York summer people. Her paintings, framed and on display. That was her only realistic chance of ever achieving any notice again. “When the summer people come back—”
    “Oh, honey.” Abby threw her hands into her lap and made her face a squish of “let’s be frank” compassion. “I don’t think they’re coming back. Even if they don’t build that reservoir, you know what? The place to be will be somewhere new. I can see that now, now that I’m here.”
    “That’s not necessarily true.”
    “It’s the way it always happens. Look—magazines are full of stories about how people are driving. Cars. More and more. All these roads and bridges Roosevelt’s going to build all over the country? Vacationers