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didn’t.
    •   •   •
    The emerging artist residency that Lydia had recommended Norris for had launched her, really. Though anything would have, Lydia recognized now. Norris had been poised to be launched. You could even say she launched herself, Lydia supposed, though the contacts she’d made there, which Lydia had made possible, couldn’t have hurt.
    Lydia had been honored when Norris asked her to write the recommendation, and she’d had to pretend not to be disappointed, later, when she wasn’t invited to speak on the mentors’ panel. That was how it usually worked. You sponsored someone and if she got in they invited you to come speak, at the end. There was a cocktail party, dinner at the lodge. The artists and their so-called mentors—usually a bunch of old careerists, but still—hobnobbed. Drinks were swilled, connections made. Sometimes you got invited back for a residency of your own.
    Or so Lydia had heard. She’d never been invited. People who had, said it was dreary, another petty honor in the petty land of academe, though Lydia had looked forward to it.
    Looking back, it was obvious what had happened. She could see that Norris had been ashamed of their friendship, the community college connection. She’d already erased it from her official past. And of course Norris never asked Lydia for another recommendation, hadn’t needed to. If anything, Lydia thought, she should ask Norris for a recommendation, if she’d felt comfortable applying for that sort of thing, which she didn’t.
    The thing about Norris, Lydia thought, almost deleting the gallery announcement without reading it, because she knew she was too tired to reply with the right mix of nonchalance and enthusiasm, but then deciding not to because she was curious, was that she always knew exactly what to do. She never questioned that rolling over other people was the right thing. And maybe it was, Lydia thought. After all, Norris should know. She was a nature painter. She believed in natural selection, survival of the fittest.
    Her paintings were glorious, no doubt about that. Someone had described them as “acts of inspired realism, what God would have done if he’d used a paintbrush.” Certainly they were technically excellent, no one would dispute that—dense views into forests, prairies, ponds. Not landscapes—no sky, no foreground. Some waggish critic had once said she’d made a career out of seeing the trees for the forest. Mostly, though, they loved her.
    Norris was famous for this larger-than-life realism. Someone had called it her “masculine sense of pageantry,” probably because her paintings were so big, although privately, Lydia wondered. She associated pageantry with a human presence and Norris was not big on that. One reviewer cited her “almost intolerably penetrating insights”—Lydia wasn’t sure she’d go that far—and her gift for “hauntingly expressive light effects,” which, he’d said, “invite spiraling meditations on the sacredness of all life.”
    Lydia would never have said it out loud, but sometimes she wondered if Norris’s work wasn’t getting a bit . . . automatic. Weren’t the paintings starting to look a little rote, like copies of photographs? Lydia wondered if anyone would ever call Norris on it. Lydia wondered, also, if Norris noticed.
    Lydia scrolled down to the text of the gallery announcement. It was hard to tell from the purple prose just what the show was. She’d tried to keep up to date on her reading but this didn’t seem to make sense. The show appeared to have something to do with animals, or their parts—midway through the e-mail there appeared a fuzzy picture of something identified as a candied guinea pig heart—but the image of Norris’s work was the same as everything she’d done for the past ten years.
    Lydia scanned the announcement. It seemed that Norris had been included in the show because she painted animals’
habitats
. I get it, Lydia thought, a