From where she stood at the back of the room by the table of sandwiches and lemonade, Della couldn’t see their faces, just their feet reflected at the top of the angled mirror. They were the most peaceful feet she had ever seen—no crossing and recrossing of ankles, no shifting to ease an aching hip, no impatient scuffing. They were the feet of happy, attentive listeners. Della smiled. This painting class was by far the most successful of all the cultural events she had put on at the nursing home. There was something mesmerizing about Bob Rigsby—his open face and his gentle lessons in watercolor philosophy and horticultural history.

“This very rose that I am painting today may have been planted by Thomas Jefferson himself at Monticello,” he was saying, and he went on with storytelling smoothness to describe the Roundabout Walk, the grove of trees, and the distant mists of the Blue Ridge Mountains. There was the soporific swish-swish of the brush in the water and the little tap-tap against the glass, then a deft stroke, and there went a wavery crimson stripe streaking up through the pink and white. Suddenly in the middle of all that peace and quiet, old Lila Hardwick yelped, “Monday!”

“Oh, Lila,” someone scolded. There was a general grumbling sound, and an impatient scuffle as the contented feet in the mirror shifted irritably.

Bob Rigsby sat up and looked out at them sharply. “Monday?” he said. But the concentration was broken, and people began gathering up canes and walkers. Della announced in her clear, bright voice that it was time for a break. Some people stumped off to the bathroom, some clumped up at the back table for their sandwich and lemonade, and several hung over Bob Rigsby’s painting table, peering down at the picture in amazement, as if they could not believe the real thing would look the same as what they had been watching in the mirror.

“How did he make it do that?” said Emily Hancock, and “Now don’t it look just like a rose?” said her husband, Harold, and “I have never seen a rose stripedy like that,” said Lucille Patterson.

Bob Rigsby was free to have this lunch break to himself in the visitors’ lounge or to smoke a cigarette in the Memory Garden, but instead he took his plate and cup into the thick of it and sat right down between old Miss Lila Hardwick and Miss Ethel Livingstone. He handed Lila a cucumber sandwich. “What made you say ‘Monday’?” he asked.