“Does he care what you’re doing?” I looked up into her beautiful troubled face. Except for Patricia Morgan, she may have been the first truly grown woman I had ever known, a full and complete woman who was free to act. I could not have expressed her fascination for me then. I only knew that I was drawn to her and for some reason she was allowing me to draw near. I had no idea that there was something in myself that could call up an answering love in such a creature. I thought of myself as a half-baked, not dry behind the ears, slightly overweight, pretty much ruined forever person. I could hide in books and I could pretend to love myself but it was a chimera in which I did not believe. If Derry allowed me to draw near to her, I thought it was some mistake or momentary lapse.

“Does he care?” I repeated. “Does he care what you’re doing?”

“I don’t know.” She reached down and took my face in her hands. “I don’t think so, Rhoda. He loves me, you know. He wants me to do what I have to do. He wants me to be happy.”

I didn’t answer. It was too large an idea for me. I could hear the words but I could not understand them. I could not imagine such a thing being true.

The phone rang again. It was Roy Reed again, calling to talk to her about Orville Faubus.

We found Charles William and Irise in the master bedroom kneeling on an unmade bed, looking at a painting above the headboard. It was a painting of autumn leaves beneath a tree. “It’s a Wyeth,” Charles William said, and I shook my head. “There’s a catalogue of his things,” Derry added. “I’ll show it to you. He’s a northern painter. You might not have heard of him.”

“Come here, Dee.” Charles William pulled me onto the bed and I knelt beside him and looked as hard as I could at the strange painting. It was so simple and so compelling. I examined the details, the seemingly messy brushwork. I think now it was the first real painting I had ever been close to. I had never been in an art museum. I felt small and uneducated and dumb but Charles William put his arm around me and brought me into the field of his pleasure. “It’s egg-based acrylic, Dee. It has the feel of oil but it lets him work fast. I read an article about it. I’ve been dying to see one.”

“It’s great,” I said. “I love it. Where’s the book? I want to see the book.”