Not because I had discipline so much as because once the door reopened, I could not seem to close it again. I painted mornings and threw them out. Painted horses badly, then better. Painted the western ridge in six different moods. Painted memory badly and weather beautifully and human faces with embarrassing caution. Ellis, who had no patience for false modesty, would stop by the studio door each afternoon and say things like, “That horse’s neck’s too short,” or, “The sky in this one looks like it means business,” and then leave before I could ask whether either was criticism.
Jenna laughed more during that period than she had since the funeral.
There is no measuring what it means to watch your daughter come back to herself after nearly handing her grief to the wrong people. She and I did not become sentimental just because the crisis had redirected us. We remained who we were. She was still quick-tempered, still analytical, still impatient with vagueness. I was still prone to overthinking and sudden, useless guilt. But the farm made honesty easier. Perhaps because the place itself had been built from hidden truth finally forced into daylight.
We kept watching Joshua’s videos every morning, though increasingly they became less about secrets and more about companionship. Instructions about where the best sunrise sat in January. Stories about his first horse as a boy. A recording of him trying, and failing, to fix a gate latch while muttering things he would never have said in front of Jenna at twelve. Memories of the first apartment we rented in St. Paul, where the radiator hissed all winter and our downstairs neighbor practiced saxophone badly after ten p.m.
Some mornings we cried. Some mornings we laughed. Some mornings we simply let him sit at the kitchen table with us while frost crept over the windows and coffee steamed between our hands.
By Christmas, Maple Creek no longer felt like a place I had inherited. It felt like a place I was participating in.