With a smile, she laid the paintings out on the desktop, and then on the floor. These were Papi’s masterpieces. A pair of framed paintings of flamingoes. Another pair of red macaws, their bills open, wings extended. There was a large painting of a majestic snowy egret and a pale pink cockatoo perched on a flowering dogwood branch, a blue heron depicted wading in shallow water, much like the heron Drue had stalked at sundown, and another pair of bird paintings, these of roseate spoonbills, returning to roost over a moss-draped swamp. There was even a paint-by-numbers of a dolorous-looking pelican sitting on a piling that reminded her of the pelicans at Merry Pier.

For much of his working life, woodworking had been her grandfather’s passion, but after his first heart attack in his early seventies, Nonni had demanded that he find a less active hobby. She’d bought him his first paint-by-numbers kit, a cheesy depiction of The Last Supper, and he’d eagerly put down the hammer and picked up the paintbrush.

Drue estimated that her grandfather probably completed at least a hundred paintings before his death, all with his name, Alberto, proudly signed in the bottom right corner. Tropical birds were his favorite subject, but after he’d filled up all the walls in the cottage, he’d moved on to snowy scenes of New England, then sailboats at sunset, followed by exotic depictions of palm trees and grass huts in the South Pacific, woodland scenes of stags and does and elk, then dogs and kittens. He’d crafted his own frames for the paintings, and joyfully gifted them to family and friends, even his cardiologist and the mailman.

She was still filled with remorse at the memory of the paint-by-numbers works Papi had presented to her for her bedroom in Fort Lauderdale: three scenes of ballerinas in pink tutus, which she’d callously replaced with posters of New Kids on the Block. What she wouldn’t give to have those long-lost paintings back.

A blank wall in the living room became a gallery wall of Alberto’s bird paintings now, and in her bedroom she hung a trio of the Polynesian scenes he’d toiled over for weeks, one of a sarong-clad beauty in front of a grass hut, another of an outrigger canoe at sunset, and the third, her favorite, a pair of palm trees with a glowing volcano in the background. Now, when she was lying in bed, looking out the window at the dunes and the beach beyond, she could also look at Papi’s paintings, and remember the joy his hobby had given him.