“Art consumes a person, if they’re good at it. When he’s working, Ben doesn’t touch a bottle. But when he finds himself between projects or feeling down, there are times he climbs into it,” Marge said.
Olivia didn’t know what to say. She was not used to such honest disrobing from someone she’d just met.
“He’s a quiet drunk, sticks to the property like an old sheepdog and sleeps it off.” She took a sip of her tea and looked at Olivia over the rim of her cup. “At worst, you’ll find him snoring in the barn. And that’s when you come find me. Will that be a problem?”
Olivia shook her head. She knew too well the lure of alcohol, and the ways people flirted with it, from years in the restaurant. It was common, on both sides of the table. There were business clients who were day drunks. Kitchen workers who got hammered after their shift. Waitresses who did shots, and much more, in the dingy staff bathroom, before heading downtown to clubs. She did not judge. But she was also not foolish enough to harbor anything but a healthy respect for the reality of it.
“I’ve dealt with it in the restaurant,” Olivia confided. “As long as it doesn’t impact me or my daughter.”
Marge regarded her appraisingly. “Good answer. It won’t, I can assure you. Mostly Ben manages it. Sometimes it manages him. You’ll come to understand the difference.”
What Marge was asking of her, Olivia realized, she was desperate for herself. Respect and space.
Growing up in the city, Olivia had never realized what effect space would have on her. She was used to storing pots and pans (and toilet paper!) in her galley kitchen oven. She and Luci had shared one cramped bedroom, her child-sized cot squeezed in against the foot of Olivia’s bed. They walked up three flights of stairs with groceries, which they crammed into the two tiny cabinets above the stove. There was no space to work, to stretch one’s legs, to spread out. Certainly not to sculpt.
Until then, Olivia had used a rear corner of her father’s restaurant kitchen for her work. He allowed her to keep a small table by a slop sink in what had been a prep area. She’d arrive early in the mornings, when Luci went to school, only hours after the last of the kitchen staff and servers had gone home for the night. The kitchen was quiet and empty; she would work until the afternoon shift arrived to set up the dining room and stock the bar. It was not ideal, but it was what she had.
Here now, with the vaulted barn ceilings and plated glass windows and the overhead loft, Olivia had a new concept of space. Not just in which to work, but in which to envision. To flex her ideas as surely as she stretched her limbs on her morning walks with Luci through the wooded trails that ran behind the house. To sleep beneath the velvety sky, an uninterrupted stretch of dark ribbon and bright star that simply did not exist in the city. To steal an hour here or there at her worktable when Ben took his daily nap. This was what it meant to take up space.
But space was not enough. What Olivia struggled with now was time. As a single mother and studio assistant, there wasn’t much left. Something that frustrated her deeply given that the ideal artist’s space and boundless inspiration were mere steps away from her cottage. Now she hurried through emails. She gathered the outgoing mailings for the September show to drop off at the post office, and jotted down a list of messages to leave for Marge on the desk. Marge would only involve Ben in communications with the outside world if she felt it necessary. He did not occupy any office space in the loft; his domain was strictly the barn floor, where such distractions would not interfere with his work.
Sometimes Olivia wondered at the devotion Marge gave Ben. At her selfless contentment to manage his world, so that he could manage his art. It reminded her of her father, of how he threw himself into his culinary creations. Of the years it took for Olivia to understand that her father loved her as much as, indeed more than, his restaurant. And how she’d struggled to understand it as a child, when other fathers rose early in the morning to take their daughters to soccer games, and were home at night to read to them and tuck them into bed. Love is love, her aunt used to tell her when she brought Olivia home from the restaurant at night to tuck her into bed. Don’t question its form.
* * *
Back inside the cottage, Olivia lined up the bounty from the farmer’s market on the butcher block counter. Yellow summer squash and zucchini. Fresh corn. Four fragrant heirloom tomatoes. The sight of them pleased her more than she could explain, and she smiled to herself as she ticked through the possibilities: sausage-stuffed squash with Gruyère, roasted tomatoes on hunks of crusty sourdough, tomatoes caprese. No additions, beyond a sprinkle of sea salt and zest of lemon. Summer made cooking so easy.
Luci, who’d been hovering nearby surveying the goods, tucked something quickly behind her back and bolted for the stairs, Buster on her heels.
“Just where are you two going?” Olivia called after her.
Luci halted. “Nowheres.”
“You wouldn’t happen to be going nowhere with that lovely chunk of cheddar, now would you?”
Luci slumped. “But it’s sooo good, Mama.”
“Indeed. Come help me set up a cheese board.” Olivia sliced the cheddar into fat ribbons, which she set atop grainy crackers and handed to Luci. She selected a Cantal she knew Jake liked for its familiarity to farmhouse cheddar and a bleu. Jake claimed he only liked cow’s milk varieties, but she was secretly determined to turn him on to the ripe goat’s milk of Montchevre.
“You need to be more adventurous. When my five-year-old has a more sophisticated palate than a grown man, there is work to be done,” she teased him. She ran a knife through a ripe pear, licked the juice from her fingers, and fanned the slices artfully on the board.
“Is Jake coming?”
It was still strange to hear Luci say his name, given that she’d never once spoken to him. Olivia often wondered how that made Jake feel.
“Would you like that?”
Luci nodded. “I want him to stay for dinner.”
This was unexpected. Olivia was sure Luci enjoyed Jake; it was clear by the way she trailed after him around the house. By how close she scooted next to him on the couch when the three of them watched a movie, or the way she tipped her head back and covered her giggle with her hand when he joked around at the dinner table. But Olivia was in love with him, and it was hard to love two people who did not yet speak to each other.
“It must be your lucky day, because I already invited him.” Outside there was the sudden crunch of gravel in the driveway as his Wrangler pulled in. She wiped her hands quickly with the dish towel. “And look—here he is!”
Luci thundered to the door, hopping up and down until Jake appeared on the other side of the screen. “Salutations.” Something was hidden behind his back.
Olivia pulled him inside. Jake’s face was ruddy with sun and vigor, his two-day-old stubble rough against her cheek. “You smell good. Like the beach.”
“I was out earlier on my bike.” He pecked her on the lips, something he’d only started to do recently in front of Luci, and produced a small bouquet of wildflowers from behind his back. “For you,” he said, holding them out to Luci. “I picked them this morning on my ride.”
Luci hesitated before gingerly accepting them, and Olivia feared her heart might burst.