"You have your hands full with Uncle Jacob, and besides, few people take as good care of their home as you do. She has no right to pass judgment anyway. She has a housekeeper and probably never lifted a broom in her life."
"Oh no. When she was younger, she had to do all the housework because her father wouldn't employ a maid, and Belinda--"
She stopped and bit down on her lower lip, realizing she was about to violate her own rule: if you can't say something nice about someone, don't say anything.
Holly beeped her horn and I knew it was she who had come for me because her horn sounded like a goose with laryngitis. This time I was more definite about my promise to be home early enough to help with dinner and then I left the house. Holly was wearing half moon silver earrings that dangled nearly to her shoulders and a shimmery tank top and a dark blue full-length skirt with sandals. Her toenails were neon pink.
"He slept in the studio if he slept at all," she muttered as I got into the car. "I didn't realize he hadn't come to bed until I woke this morning. Either he's hypnotized himself or the sculpture has possessed him. Artists," she said raising her eyes. "When they get hooked on their own work, they're worse than those monks who take vows of silence. But," she added, turning to me, "I must admit I've never seen him so taken with anything else he's done."
She blinked and took another look at me.
"What's with you this morning? You look as serious as a truck driver with hemorrhoids."
"I've got to make some very important decisions," I said.
"Oh? Well, I told you that your day of birth indicates you possess an imaginative mind coupled with excellent powers of observation. Don't trust too much to luck. Depend more on your own intuitive vision."
"Luck," I said with a laugh. "Whatever I bet on is sure to lose."
"Don't be down on yourself. Remember what I said about negative energy," Holly warned. "Your personal planets are Saturn and Uranus," she continued. "Under favorable influences, it's good for seeking favors from elderly people, but use tact and diplomacy instead of force.
"And under unfavorable influences?" I asked. She nodded.
"Postpone change and long journeys."
"Is it a favorable or unfavorable time?" I asked. "I'll study my charts and let you know later," she promised.
Holly was so serious about her beliefs, I couldn't laugh. Who knew? Maybe there was some truth to it.
Kenneth was in the studio when we arrived, but I wasn't prepared for what he looked like when I entered. He was pale and drained, his beard scraggly and his cheeks and neck unshaven. His clothes were wrinkled and looked slept in. His eyes were distant, bloodshot, the eyes of someone who was looking beyond everything that stood before him. He barely muttered a good morning when I greeted him.
I saw he had made considerable progress on the sculpture, especially with the face. It was becoming the face in the drawings, the face of my mother, more than it was my face. There was that slight turn in the upper lip that Mommy had, especially when she was being coy.
Kenneth's hands did have miraculous artistic power, I thought. As I gazed at the work in progress, I felt t
he movement. It was almost as if the stone girl would become flesh and blood at any moment and pull herself up and out of the base. Under his surgical fingers, the marble looked malleable, easier to form than clay. The figure's shoulders and face already showed skin-like texture, down to the way it rippled over the embossed cheekbones and breastbone. Perhaps, I thought, an artist was a person born with more life in him than other people and he puts some of that life into the work itself, diminishing himself every time he creates something as great as this, until one day, he is just an ordinary man surrounded by his creations, but comforted by the thought that he could never die as long as his work lived.
How was I to compete with this for his attention and love? I wondered.
"Did you have any breakfast yet, Kenneth?" I asked. For a while I thought he either hadn't heard me or didn't care to reply. Then he paused and looked at me.
"I had some coffee and a piece of something," he said.
"Piece of something?"
"A doughnut, I think." He thought another moment. "Or was that yesterday?" He shrugged and looked at his sculpture.
"Grandma Olivia sent for me last night, Kenneth, because your father told her what he had told me."
"Oh?" He brushed off the left earlobe on the sculpture and stepped back to study the face of Neptune's Daughter. "Just a minute," he said. "I want to check something."
I thought he was going to look at me to compare, but instead, he went to his drawings. He nodded to himself and wiped his hands on a rag.
"What were you saying about Olivia?"
"She sent for me because Judge Childs told her about our conversation."
"What did she want?"