do.
That week, as the weather stayed perfect, each day cloudless and crisp, Hen got into a solid routine, walking every day to the studio after breakfast, working all morning on the remaining prints for the Lore Warriors book, getting lunch at the small riverside café just down the street from the studios, then spending the afternoon preparing for the weekend. She cleaned her space, selected fifteen prints—including her most recent, the cat in bed with the girl on the windowsill—to display on the wall. She even drove to Walmart to buy one of those giant plastic buckets of pretzel nubs filled with peanut butter. It was her favorite junk food, and she only ever allowed herself to buy them on open studio weekends, putting out a bowl for the visitors, but, really, it was her small reward for the misery of having strangers stroll through her workspace, judging her.
It was a good week, strangely enough, despite how often she found herself thinking of Matthew Dolamore and what she’d seen him do. In the evenings, Lloyd and she cooked dinner together. The Red Sox had bowed out in the first round of the playoffs, sending Lloyd into a silent sulk for twenty-four hours, but now they were free to catch up on the last season of Game of Thrones.
She kept all the curtains that faced the Dolamore house pulled closed. Lloyd had no doubt noticed, but he hadn’t mentioned it.
On Saturday morning Lloyd walked with Hen to Black Brick Studios to see what she’d done with the space. Open Studios was noon to five both weekend days, and the place was bustling, as it had been all week. Lloyd drank coffee and looked at the prints she’d selected to hang on the wall. Hen knew that most of them were familiar to him—her “greatest hits” that she always trotted out for shows—but he hadn’t seen her newest work, and he stared at it for a while before asking, “Have I seen this one before?”
“I just did it.”
“I like it,” he said. “Creepy. What’s it about?”
It was a question she hated, and a question that Lloyd should have known she hated, but sometimes he couldn’t help himself. He loved her artwork, at least he always said he did, but also felt a need to analyze it to death.
“It’s about Matthew Dolamore,” she said.
Lloyd swung around, concerned, and she bugged her eyes out at him and said, “Kidding. I don’t know what it’s about. It just popped into my head.”
He stuck around for most of the morning, eating pretzels until she told him to stop.
“What are you putting out with these?” he asked. “To drink?”
“I have apple cider.”
“Ooh, you should warm it up, put some spices in it. It would make it smell nice in here.”
Hen thought that was a good idea. She had a hot plate in her studio and sent Lloyd to get a pot and buy some cider spices. She was glad to get rid of him. She knew he’d leave as soon as people started walking through her space, but she wanted a little time alone. She prepped about eight copper plates that she could run through her press that afternoon. She found it so much better to stay busy, hating the act of standing around watching strangers look at her art. Lloyd returned right before noon. He had their yellow Dutch oven, a packet of spices, and even a pint of Maker’s Mark.
“You think I should spike the cider?” Hen said, laughing.
“I thought it might be good to have it, just in case.”
He put the cider on low, and soon her studio was filled with the smell of apples and cloves. Lloyd and she each had a mugful, spiked with bourbon, and she felt a sudden, overwhelming sense of well-being, that things would turn out all right. When the first visitors arrived—a middle-aged couple, the man glum and uninterested, and the woman with a streak of purple in her hair, wearing two handmade brooches on her coat—Lloyd took off.
It was a busy afternoon. The nice weather brought out a ton of people, and the cider was gone by three in the afternoon, nothing left but a dark slurry on the bottom of the pot. Hen had underpriced her prints and wound up selling about fifteen of them. She was used to doing open studio events, having done them for years in Somerville, but it was a slightly different crowd out in the suburbs. They asked more questions and