“Your mother was a dreamer,” he said whenever they told the kids the story. Clueless was more like it. She’d assumed the man was important when he stopped by her open studio at CSVA. That much was obvious, given the clutch of assistants waiting outside the open door, but she didn’t know he was one of the trustees, a director whose name was on the new media arts wing, the Theodore Stabler Jr.

“I’m Ted,” he’d said. “I love your work.”

“Hi, Ted, I’m Holly,” she said breezily, as if she’d had dozens of visitors that day when in fact she’d only had one. And then he’d let her rattle on about color and texture, as if she were some kind of expert.

He wasn’t exactly what she’d been looking for—if he’d been a gallerist, or a visiting professor from Parsons, or a bartender with plug earrings, she would’ve taken more note—but once she said yes to dinner, the rest was easy. Loving someone who was ready to love you back wasn’t calculus. So how had her life become this complicated and bizarre? For too long she’d been too busy living up to Ted’s exacting logic to notice the slow erosion of her own.

She never meant to be this cautious. There was so much in Ted’s life to say yes to that she hardly noticed all the things she was saying no to. No to New York. No to privacy and driving herself. No to playing things by ear. No to beets and sweet potatoes and best friends who could relate. No to being the star of her own life, and to the idea that anything she did could ever be important enough to compete with Ted’s genius. She wasn’t that girl from the mountains anymore, who ignored her parents’ practical arguments against going to art school, feeling herself that it must lead somewhere. She wasn’t that country girl who knew how much she didn’t know but trusted she would figure it out.

Or was she?

Somewhere deep down, underneath the sediment of the last fifteen years, was the girl her father had raised. She stood and cast her line again. She would keep moving until she drew a strike. She would work the problem until she found a solution.

23

Zanne