A Change of Heart (22 page)

Pulling a large plastic tarp from under the sink, Annabeth covered the kitchen table and then spread out her paints.
 
Stopping only once to walk into the living room and turn on the stereo, Annabeth painted for hours.
 
When it began to grow dark outside, she switched on the overhead light and continued painting.
 
Eventually every inch of counter space, the kitchen table, and the dining table were covered with pictures.
 
Some were in series-- children at the beach; kittens of all types with their mothers; hidden spots in nature which featured the tiniest places like the worlds under toadstools, undersea pictures, a gopher in his burrow.
 
Some were individual pictures of the sort of quaint scenes Annabeth usually painted on her furniture.
 
They weren't the dainty watercolors that are the custom, but instead were more like sketches with color, ideas set down on the page but not fully articulated.

After hours of non-stop work, Annabeth's neck and eyes ached, her fingers were tight and cramped, her legs stiff, her back knotted, yet still she painted.
 
When she could no longer lift her arm, Annabeth glanced at the clock.
 
It was three in the morning.
 
"Imagine that," she said aloud to the cat, who was seated placidly at her feet.
 
She rose then and treated the bewildered feline to another can of food, despite the fact that he had not asked for it.
 
"Let's see," she said, walking through the room, stopping at each painting to examine her work.
 
All but the last were dry and she separated them into piles which she mentally labeled: not too bad, all right, and terrible.
 
Flipping them over so that the cat couldn't mess them up with his foot prints, she left the three piles on the counter and switched off the light, climbing the stairs, walking stiffly into her bedroom then tossing her clothes into the hamper.
 
She washed her hands and face, pulled on a nightgown and climbed exhausted into the bed.

She slept almost instantly, and in her dreams she walked through grassy meadows, a heavy pack on her back, herself younger and her children small tots clinging to her hand.
 
Together they moved through the fragrant grasses, the gentle rustling of fruit tree branches overhead.
 
Off in the distance was her home, but how odd it looked.
 
It was her house but it wasn't her house.
 
Annabeth squinted toward the dwelling ahead of her.
 
Pulling the girls along, they moved faster but the house got no closer.
 
Momentarily distracted, Annabeth looked up at the sky.
 
It was a perfect blue, vast and untroubled by clouds.
 
When she looked back down, Laurel was gone.
 
Off in a distance was a bus and Annabeth could see her daughter inside waving to her.
 
"Is today a school day?" she mused to Sally, who was too little to speak.
 

She walked with Sally for a while longer, and the house seemed a bit closer.
 
Why had they journeyed so far from home?
 
Fearing that Sally would tire before they completed the trip, Annabeth stopped to rest, pulling her daughter down beside her.
 
Dozing in reality, and briefly in her dream, Annabeth looked about, still in the meadow.
 
Sally!
 
Where was she?
 
Off in the distance, she spotted her daughter, waving to her from a tree house where Sally was playing.
 
She walked up to the tree house, but Sally waved her on, making it clear that Annabeth was to go on without her.
 

She walked some more, sensing that she was getting closer, knowing she would arrive soon enough.
 
What is this, she thought, pulling the heavy pack off her back and dropping it to the soft ground.
 
Reaching down, she tried to unzip the pack, but the zipper stuck.
 
Tugging harder, she was able to budge it, and inch by inch it opened, revealing the contents inside.
 
There were framed portraits of the people in her life.
 
Her parents.
 
Maggie.
 
Her husband.
 
Julie.
 
Where are the girls' pictures, she wondered, but there were none.
 
Look at this, all my report cards.
 
A heavy bundle of paper, fastened by two rubber bands, was much larger than all her accumulated report cards might really have been.
 
At the very bottom of the bag was a collection of art materials which was tightly sealed.
 
Leaving all but the art materials lying at the base of a tree, Annabeth rose, thinking, I can come back for these later; they're too heavy now.
 
The pouch, much lightened, hung easily on her shoulder, and she walked into the distance toward her home.

Remembering nothing of her dream upon awakening, Annabeth glanced at the clock.
 
Ready to tense, thinking she had to hurry off to the drugstore, she thought for a moment and relaxed again.
 
It was her day off.
 
She wished she could snuggle back down for a while, but instead she rose, dressing and brushing her teeth.
 
The cat, startled by her haste, leapt from the bed and raced down the stairs, although he was probably not hungry.
 
She fed him immediately and downed a glass of orange juice as she baked a batch of cupcakes for Julie to take into little Bobby's class, and while they were in the oven, she flipped through the work of the previous night.
 
Next time she would work a little longer on each one.
 

There was a flea market outside of town, and although it wasn't well stocked on a weekday, Annabeth went there nevertheless.
 
She found a couple of small, spindly tables, some old recipe boxes, a couple of wooden bowls, one wooden compote dish, and about a dozen other small pieces of the general variety classified as this and that.
 
The whole lot fit easily into her trunk, and Annabeth drove then to the hobby shop that Becky had recommended.
 
There she acquired a bit more of this and that.

Back at home, she set up a makeshift work table of plywood on a couple of sawhorses and applied a base coat of white to everything.
 
Allowing the paint plenty of time to dry, Annabeth walked back into the kitchen where she washed her hands, prepared some lunch and took it into R.J.'s den.
 
When it had been built, this room was designed as a retreat for the man of the house, and had been paneled with dark wood, which remained.
 
One could imagine the mahogany desk and heavy drapes at the window, although there was nothing like that in there now.
 
An old table, of the Formica and metal variety, sat in a corner, next to a dented metal filing cabinet.
 
The bookcases at the rear of the room contained an outdated set of encyclopedias as well as a collection of atlases, travel books and an assortment of maps R.J. had assembled over the years.
 
How many trips had he planned and how few had they actually taken?
 
Once they were even set to move up North, a plan that R.J. was certain offered him every opportunity he had lacked in Gull's Perch.
 
They had gone so far as accepting a deposit on the house, but before it was time to sign the papers he changed his mind, and so they stayed put.

Most of the room was filled with the infamous and mostly unused gym equipment.
 
An old couch, covered in ragged, garish plaid, that had once belonged to Mother Welner, was pressed against a wall, and reaching for an atlas, Annabeth sat on the couch eating her lunch and looking over the book.

She had lived in Gull's Perch all her life, but she had driven no farther than an hour beyond its limits.
 
She knew where the surrounding towns were, of course, and she knew how to reach them, but until now there had never been a reason to devise an itinerary.
 
Following the spidery lines on the atlas' pages with her finger, she envisioned the trips she would take, the stops in each small town to check for shops that might want to buy some of her things.
 
Looking down at the map made it real.
 
She had only to prepare a reasonable number of items over the next couple of weeks, load the treasures, as Becky called them, into her car, and then go traveling.

Highway Ninety-eight lay on the edge of the state, running along the water, and it connected all the coast towns in the panhandle from Pensacola to Panacea, where it turned inland toward Tallahassee.
 
Considered the scenic route, it provided a spectacular vista in either direction out of Gull's Perch, whether the view was of the pristine Gulf waters or through the forests of pine that once covered the entirety of the state.
 
Going east, one saw the little beach towns with their insignificant but charming cottages on the seaside, or in the least elevated areas, houses built on stilts so tall their bottom floors were essentially floating at second story level.
 
To the west lay elegant communities of newly erected Victorian homes that looked more like doll houses than human dwellings, golf resorts with high rise hotels and condominiums, all dotted with charming ponds, little inlets and marked duck crossings.
 
Each spot was a vacationer's paradise because of the famous white sand beaches that even in the hottest weather remained cool to the touch.

Wisely realizing that all the towns on that route catered to tourists and would therefore have shops like Etta's, Annabeth selected it.
 
Equipped with R.J.'s atlas, which she would not need, a sports bottle of ice water, a tote containing a sandwich, some fruit, and a bag of cookies, she set out on her exploration, the trunk full of the newly decorated items she had readied.

It was the first time Annabeth had undertaken any such project on her own, and she was petrified.
 
It was worse than having to perform in a play.
 
She wanted to turn the car back around and forget the whole thing. Whatever would she say to these people?
 
They'd think she was just some silly housewife out to pester them.
 
Over and over as she drove, Annabeth rehearsed a series of opening lines.
 
Her heart raced each time she imagined having to walk into a store with her work, and only the thought of her house and how she was going to save it gave her the will to keep going.

Thinking intermittently about R.J. and his travels, for the first time she understood the lure of his vending machine business and of being on the road.
 
Driving like this was liberating; it was exciting to be able to go anywhere she wanted.
 
How hard it must have been for him to be trapped all those years as a mechanic, penned up inside when he yearned to be free and out in the world.
 
How hard to work on the planes when what he wanted was to be the glamorous aviator flying them.

The approach to each small town was pretty much the same.
 
There would be miles of open road, followed by an occasional dwelling, then a business here and there and finally a cluster of houses and shops that defined the town, then everything in reverse until there was more open road again.
 
Stopping in front of her first possibility, Annabeth pulled from the trunk two large shopping bags filled with small items, but instead of pushing them back into the car and racing away as she wanted to do, the image of her house floated into her mind, so she took a deep breath and walked into the store, which was empty except for the proprietor, a woman who was much too old for the skin-baring sundress she sported.

In a way which she hoped was friendly and confident despite the knots in her stomach, Annabeth smiled at the woman
 
"I wanted to show you these," stammered Annabeth, then gaining more courage, she continued, "To sell."
 
She set the bags down at her feet, reached down and pulled out a couple of the small items and set them on the counter.

"Hmm," said the woman noncommittally, which inspired Annabeth to remove a few more pieces and offer them to her.
 
"Interesting," was the comment, and Annabeth continued piling her work on the counter.
 
"Do you have a price list?"

Annabeth swallowed hard.
 
A price list!
 
"They're all one of a kind.
 
I planned to price them individually."

"That's fine." The woman offered Annabeth her hand, saying, "I'm Maud Bullock."

Annabeth relaxed a bit then, shaking her hand and replying, "Annabeth Welner.
 
So nice to meet you."

"And you're the artist?"

"Yes, I painted them all."

"Let's see, what do we have here?
 
Two dozen pieces."

"Actually it's twenty-eight items.
 
But I'll be painting more."

"We won't be getting busy for Christmas gifts until after November, of course."

Thinking this was a rejection, Annabeth nodded, smiled, and picked up a couple of items to return them to the bag.
 
"Oh, I understand."

Placing her hand on Annabeth's arm so the pieces remained on the counter, Maud continued, "But I could buy a few now.
 
If the price is right, of course."