In the last year of her mother’s life, when Marianne was seventeen and Ruth was five, Theresa Stuart’s line changed. She’d given up painting entirely—the smell of linseed oil and turpentine made her nausea worse—and an illustration style that had been exuberant, detailed, sprawling became spare, as if the line itself were conscious of a finite amount of ink or energy. The line was more fluid, but it took up less space. No more cross-hatching or stippling, those skills her Art I and II students applied clumsily to glass bottles and pewter Confederate-themed belt buckles and deceptively hard to draw deer antlers. Instead she set the pen (never now the erasable, impermanent pencil) on smooth paper and did not pick it up again until the small scene was complete. A lamp on an occasional table. A silver teaspoon resting on a napkin. A mason jar on the kitchen counter. It didn’t take much, she told her students, to get your point across. Look how a single line becomes something recognizable—a hand, a sleeping cat, a face.

Marianne’s father thought Theresa should stop teaching entirely, as it was never, after all, her life’s true goal or purpose. But it’s hard to reconnect with your true goal and purpose after drifting so far away from it—especially when you have only so much time left, maybe six or eight months, maybe a year. She kept her advanced afternoon class, Art IV, a small group of serious students, mostly girls, which included Marianne, not a talented artist but a talented something, Theresa was always reassuring her. She spent mornings in appointments or chemotherapy, but could be home in time to rest, change, and head to the elementary school, where she took lunch to Ruth and sat with her while she ate it.

It was in chemotherapy that she developed the new style of drawing, which began with a one-handed sketch of an IV infusion pole. The first time she had cancer she’d been pregnant, and she hadn’t had chemo then—she’d had the cancer cut out. They watched and waited, then the cancer returned, like a stick the doctors didn’t realize was boomerang-shaped, and now she knew the IV pole well, knew waiting rooms, pathology reports, the smarting port. She knew recipes for several marijuana-infused baked goods.