I walked around the room, taking in the career retrospective hanging on the walls before me. At the center of one wall hung the painting I’d done in high school, the infamous scene at the T-Cup.

“How’d you get that one?”

“When I stepped down from the board at Yeatman, Kip Dodd wanted to give me a gift. So I asked for the painting. Your mother loves them all, but that’s her favorite. She used to sit in here for hours. She’d take a book and say she was going in to read, but whenever I found her, she was looking at the paintings.”

“I don’t remember Mom being much of a reader,” I said.

“You never knew her very well then, did you?”

“No, sir, I did not.”

“As children, we only see our mothers in relation to ourselves. It’s only when we’re older that we get a chance to know them.”

“I guess I missed out on that.”

“You did indeed.”

“I wish I hadn’t.”

Jim walked around me and gazed out the window.

“I have a proposition for you,” he said. “Would you paint your mother for me? Not as she is now, but as she was before.”

As she was before.

“I don’t do very many portraits,” I said.

This wasn’t true. I painted faces almost as often as landscapes. But to reproduce my mother as she had been before the cancer ravaged her—did I dare attempt such a thing?

“I’ll have everything set up for you in her room,” he said. “You’ll work there, by your mother’s bedside. She wants you near her. I have some pictures for you to use. There’s one in particular that I like.”

He paused to catch his breath.

“For the completed portrait, I’ll pay you ten thousand,” he said. “And I’ll see that you’re taken care of, in every respect.”

“I don’t want your money,” I said.

Jim sighed. “I’ve only ever shown you kindness,” he said.

“I know.”

I almost wanted to hug him.

I began that afternoon, sketching studies from a photograph of my mother taken at their wedding. She looked so beautiful. The complexity of Jim’s divorce had forced them to wait until well after Dolly’s birth to marry; in the photograph, my mother had lost her pregnancy weight, though she still seemed to have the famed prenatal radiance.

I raised all the windows to let in fresh air when I set up my easel. The bedroom was large; I had plenty of room to work without interfering with my mother’s care. Years of painting in far more inhospitable conditions had inured me to distractions.