A shiver went across my skin. I curled my fingers around the edge of the plastic chair and hung on to it, but beneath me I imagined I could feel the floor swaying as it had when we’d entered.

After the talk ended, everyone went to the lobby to make themselves paper cups of tea, which they took out onto the steps and into the soft dark night. I remember the whisper of the breeze on my skin, the smell of mulch and mint tea, and the way light from the community building’s doorway spilled in a yellow rectangle onto the ground. It glinted on Joan’s wedding ring, which she still wore, as she raised her cup of tea to her mouth. There was something about the angle of shadows across her face or the way she lifted her arm that made her look younger to me, as if time had slipped backward and she was drinking tea somewhere else. In her studio, maybe, but not the one in Woodacre; somewhere I’d never been, and she was studying a painting in progress and asking herself if it was finished yet, or if there was more waiting to emerge from the canvas.

Someone was asking Joan whether her next gallery show would take place before the end of the year, which surprised me. I hadn’t known she was even thinking of doing another show. Of course she’d exhibited before and was represented by a gallery in San Francisco, but since Grandpa had died, she hadn’t shown any new work. I realized, with a little shock of dismay, that even though I knew Joan was an artist I had ceased to think of her as being one.

That’s what made her look different to me that night. She was Joan West again, and it was only in seeing the artist return that I recognized that part of her had been muted for years. It became clear to me in an instant how incredibly life-altering Grandpa’s death had been for her. How it had overturned so much of who she was, or at least called it into question. Was this why she had begun coming regularly to Spirit Rock? I had never thought of my grandparents as religious, though Grandpa’s funeral had been at a church. I remembered, suddenly, a Buddha statue in their small Berkeley backyard, overhung with dripping green leaves after a rainstorm.

And now she was here, in this community who knew her better than I did. I felt uncomfortable and thrilled by this revelation all at once, as if I’d discovered a stranger inside someone I loved.

Chapter 11