He didn’t know anything about her, he realized. Not really. He knew what Dunore knew. The company, the money, the reputation, and he knew what two weeks of shared space had shown him, which was someone capable in private and surprisingly decent to a difficult child. But he didn’t know what had built her.
He didn’t know what the scars were, or where they were, or how old. He thought about asking. He didn’t. Patricia Osman concluded her assessment with a list of recommendations, a school enrollment for Sophie, a counselor referral, a follow-up in 30 days, and a general disposition that suggested the placement was, if not ideal, substantially better than her case load average.
She shook both their hands at the door and told Ethan his barn needed attention, which was accurate and not her job to notice, but he thanked her for it anyway. Sophie watched her leave from the porch, then turned and went back inside without comment. Tad. The school enrollment happened the following week at a small elementary school in Dunore called Maple Creek, which had the educational resources of a small town school and the class sizes that came with it, which meant Sophie’s third grade teacher was a woman named Mrs.
Pollson, who had exactly 17 students and noticed within 20 minutes that Sophie was drawing on her scratch paper during math and that the drawing was good enough that she mentioned it to Ethan at pickup. She’s talented. Mrs. Pollson said she was a short, sandyhaired woman with reading glasses perpetually pushed up on her forehead. I mean it.
I’ve had kids who draw, and then I’ve had kids who really draw. and your daughter. The way she looks at things before she puts them on paper, the way she slows down, that’s not something you teach.” Her mother encouraged it,” Ethan said. “Well, keep encouraging it.” Mrs. Pollson looked past him at Sophie, who was waiting by the truck with her backpack and Humphrey, who she’d started tucking into the front pocket of the backpack, so just his gray head was visible.
“She’s very self-contained,” Mrs. Pollson added more quietly. I mean that as an observation, not a concern. She’s polite and she participates when called on and she’s already ahead in reading, but she doesn’t. She stays on the outside of things. Does that make sense? Yeah, Ethan said. It makes sense. Give her time, Mrs. Pollson said.
That’s usually what it takes. He drove home with Sophie buckled in the back seat, Humphrey observing the road through the windshield from the front pocket of the backpack. How was it? He asked. Fine, Sophie said. Did you like your teacher? She’s okay. She talks a lot. Is there anything you need for school? A pause.
They do an art project on Fridays. We need colored pencils. Not the cheap kind that go blunt right away. Got it, Ethan said. We’ll get you good ones. She didn’t respond to that, but she looked out the window at the passing fields with a slightly less compressed expression. And that Ethan had learned was something. The colored pencils required a trip to the art supply store in the next town over, which was 30 minutes away.
And somehow this errand became the three of them in Ethan’s truck on a Saturday morning, which had not been planned. Victoria had emerged from the farmhouse as he was getting ready to leave and said, “I need to go into town anyway.” And Sophie had appeared behind her with her jacket halfon and said, “I want to come.
” And that was how they became for that morning something that looked from the outside like a family on an errand. The art supply store was small and overstocked in the way that good specialty stores tend to be. Narrow aisles, things slightly on top of other things. A smell of tarpentine and paper that Ethan found pleasant in the abstract way you find pleasant things you don’t understand.
Sophie moved through it differently than she moved through most spaces. She slowed down. She touched things lightly with her fingertips, the different textures of papers and canvas boards, the smooth barrel of a good drawing pencil, with the focused attention of someone in a place that made sense to them. She stopped in front of the colored pencil display for a long time.
“Which ones?” Ethan said. She pointed without hesitation to a set in a metal tin, the kind with 48 colors that cost three times what the standard set cost. Then she pulled her hand back. The smaller one is fine, she said. The 24. He reached past her and picked up the 48. We’ll get these. She looked at him. They’re expensive.
I know what expensive is, he said. Get these. Something moved across her face. Not gratitude exactly, or not only gratitude. Something more complicated. The look of a person recalibrating a prior assumption. Okay, she said quietly. Victoria appeared from the next aisle with a single fine liner pen and a small pad of watercolor paper which she set on the counter at checkout without comment.
Sophie watched this and then looked up at her. What are those for? Sophie asked. I draw sometimes, Victoria said. When I’m trying to think through a problem, Sophie digested this. What kind of drawings? Diagrams mostly. Sometimes floor plans, sometimes just shapes. She paused. Not art, just thinking on paper.
Mom said all drawing is art, Sophie said. Then a flicker of something, a test or a check to see if the statement would be challenged. Your mom sounds right, Victoria said simply. Sophie looked at the watercolor pad. Can I see one sometime? One of your drawings. Victoria seemed slightly surprised by the question. Sure, she said. If you want.
November came in sideways the way it did in the valley. Rain that wasn’t quite rain and cold that wasn’t quite cold. The sky a low flat gray that turned the orchard into a pencil sketch of itself. Ethan was busy through most of it with the winter prep that the broken tractor had set him back on.
