Free Cascade by Maryanne O'Hara Page A

say?”
    “Say anything. Tell him—tell him you want to meet in town from now on. Maybe you could start something, Art Hour or something. Ask Bettyif you can run it at the library. That’s it. Get other people involved—school kids—send some kind of message to the state, do up some posters maybe.” He looked to her for approval, pleased with the idea. “Now, there’s a way you can help. We’ve got to fight this any way we can. I’ve actually decided to band a few people together to figure out a way to fight this. The men in this town who won’t buckle under.”
    And then he was gone, turned on his heels, down the stairs, and out the door. And like echo was the memory of Abby’s voice:
Asa’s house. Asa’s money. He even has your playhouse.

7
    S he heard Jacob’s knock vaguely, as if from under water. Then again, louder. “In the studio,” she called, rubbing paint from her fingers with an oily rag, rehearsing what to say.
Asa’s asked me to ask you not to come here anymore
.
Asa’s starting to get concerned about the time we’re spending together.
It all sounded so awkward; it would force them to imagine an intimacy that would embarrass them both.
    And then there he was, standing in the doorway, hat in his hands. “Hello.”
    “Hello.” It was always like this to start: quiet, cordial, eyes connecting. It was as if they acknowledged something they couldn’t put into words or act on, then moved forward with civility, as modern people, a man and woman who could simply be friends.
    Or maybe she imagined all that.
    In any case, they were easy with each other. She stepped away to reveal her canvas, to ask what he thought. And as he studied the new painting, she, with the fresh perspective that even a few minutes couldgive, saw how the light would need to fall much more significantly on that foremost blade of grass. The viewer’s eye needed to be drawn to that blade, forced to reflect on how alike it was to all the others, while still uniquely itself. She needed to add something, a drop of dew perhaps, glistening and fat.
    “If you add some aureolin yellow to the undersides of that blade, some flake white to the tip, just there,” he said, pointing, “you’ll get the intensity you’re after. Without the muddiness.” He tipped his head as if to say,
Go on
.
    She did what he suggested and the look of the blade changed—it became more dimensional, more emphatic, more what she was after. “That’s it! I want the viewer to first look and see ‘grass,’ and then look closer and mull on the fact that this blade—here—is different. And to wonder why. But I have to make it stand out even more, don’t you think? I thought of adding dew, and one of my thumbnails had the river as backdrop, but I have such a hard time with water.” She gestured to the west window, with its view to the river as it curved sharply toward town. River water was ever-changing and now the weather had been mild enough that it was flowing freely, the last specks of winter ice evaporated.
    “Water’s hard.” The sun peeked out and a patch of river briefly sparkled white, as if to make his point. “And there’s no ‘right way,’ of course. But what you want to do is look for its different colors,” he said. “Differentiate them. There’s the color of the sun’s reflection, first of all, which will hit at sharper angles than the color of the sky’s reflection, or the clouds’. You ask yourself, is the water transparent? Here, we’re too far away to worry about whether we can see the bottom, but if we were closer, it would affect the color we chose. You ask yourself, what color are the shadows? Because each ripple casts its own distinct shadow.”
    How easily he made suggestions, articulated techniques. But he shrugged as if it were nothing. “Lincoln taught me about water.”
    “The image I have of Lincoln Bell is so far removed from ‘patient teacher.’” No one had known Lincoln Bell, never mind studied with