“Still can’t tell,” admitted Clara. “But Bean seems happy, though clearly the artistic gene didn’t pass to him. Or her.”

“Why d’you say that?” Gabri asked, dipping char-grilled calamari into a delicate garlic aioli.

“Peter taught Bean the color wheel. Bean did a few paintings and put them up on the bedroom walls. They were pretty awful.”

“Most masterpieces are, at first,” said Ruth. “Yours look like a dog’s breakfast. That’s a compliment.”

Clara laughed. Ruth was right, on both counts. It was a compliment. And her paintings started off a real mess. The worse her paintings looked at first, the better they seemed to turn out.

“You too?” she asked Ruth. “How do your poems start out?”

“They start as a lump in the throat,” she said.

“Isn’t that normally just a cocktail olive lodged there?” Olivier asked.

“Once,” Ruth admitted. “Wrote quite a good poem before I coughed it up.”

“A poem begins as a lump in the throat?” Gamache asked Ruth. The elderly woman held his eyes for a moment before dropping them to her drink.

Clara was quiet, thinking. She finally nodded.

“For me too. The first go-round is all emotion just shot onto the canvas. Like a cannon.”

“Peter’s paintings look perfect right from the start,” said Olivier. “They never have to be rescued.”

“Rescued?” Gamache asked. “What do you mean by that?”

“It’s something Peter told me,” said Olivier. “He was proud that he never had to rescue a canvas because he’d screwed it up.”

“And ‘rescuing’ a painting means fixing it?” Gamache asked.

“It’s an artist’s expression,” said Clara. “Kinda technical. If you put too many layers of paint on a canvas, the pores get all clogged and the paint doesn’t hold. It gets all gloppy, the paint starts to slip off. The painting’s ruined. Mostly happens when you overwork it. Like cooking something too long. You can’t then uncook it.”

“So it’s not the subject of the painting that’s wrong,” said Myrna. “It’s just a physical thing. The canvas gets saturated.”

“Right, though the two mostly go together. You almost never overwork a canvas you’re happy with. It happens when you’re in trouble. Trying to save it. Going over and over it, trying to capture something that’s really difficult. Turning a dog’s breakfast into something meaningful. That’s when the canvas can get clogged.”

“But it’s sometimes possible to rescue it?” asked Reine-Marie.

“Sometimes. I’ve had to do it. Most of the time they’re too far gone. It’s really awful, because the canvas gives up just as I’m really close. Almost got it. Sometimes when I’ve just gotten it, put the last dab on. Then suddenly the paint shifts, starts to slip. Won’t hold and everything’s lost. Heartbreaking. It’s like you’re writing a book and you edit and edit, and you finally get it, and just as you write ‘The End’ all the words disappear.”

“Oh shit,” said Myrna and Ruth together, while on Jean-Guy’s lap Rosa muttered, “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

“But sometimes you can pull the painting back?” asked Reine-Marie. “You can save it?”