Read Online The Other Side of Blue by Valerie O. Patterson - Free Book Online Page A

the Bindases’ house, she’s polished and ready to go, even
down to her plastic slides. She’s hidden her hair under a bandana. This time, she looks the part of an artist. I can see her as a model for the front of an art-school brochure. All she’s missing is a smudge of blue paint on her nose for effect.
    â€œI come in? Yes?” Martia asks. “Cyan, too?”
    Kammi nods. Her eyebrows lower when she looks past Martia at me. She backs away to let us both in. Martia stands just inside the door, and I slip behind her into the room that every year before this one has been mine.
    â€œI come to explain,” Martia says, and she folds her hands gently in front of her, as if she is about to take the wafer from the priest at Communion. “Mrs. “Walters, she can no paint in the air today.” Martia calls en plein air “in the air.” I imagine artists weightless, suspended in midair, painting on floating canvases.
    â€œWhat do you mean?” Kammi’s face clouds. “Is she sick?”
    Martia nods. “A headache.
Mala cabeza.
Mrs. Walters, she no go out today. I call Jinco already. He take you to Willemstad. Be tourists today, yes? Much better idea. Mrs. Walters has left some money for you to spend.”
    Martia asks it as a question of Kammi, but it isn’t. Be good girls and go into town and leave Mrs. Walters to recover. Don’t make a scene. I tilt my head back, imagine Mother lying above us in her bed in her studio, her eyes squeezed shut against the light that almost won’t be kept out up there. She should be in my room, tucked against the back
of the house in the cool green shadows. But down here is too close to her old room, the closed-off room she shared with my father when he came to the island.
    I savor the taste of Kammi’s disappointment. She doesn’t cry or stamp her foot, but she looks at me sharply. Maybe she thinks it’s my fault, that I did something to make Mother come down with a headache.
    I shrug as if she’s asked me a question out loud. Who knows? Maybe Mother doesn’t really have a headache. Maybe she doesn’t want to paint en plein air with a beginner, one who will look at her as if she’s a goddess. Maybe it makes her uncomfortable, though that’s hard to imagine, given the way Philippa used to hang around our house near the lake. She started out following ten paces behind Mother wherever she went, until she became more skilled herself. After a while, Philippa became an artist in her own right. Then she started to walk beside Mother, as if they were equals.
    â€œOkay,” Kammi says, lowering her eyes. “If I can’t paint today, going to town will be okay.”
    Other than the day we arrived at the airport, I haven’t been to Willemstad this year. It’s my chance to take the sea glass I’ve collected so far to the bead shop to sell.
    â€œAnother day, you paint with Mrs. Walters. It is no problem.” Martia smiles and straightens the small silver pin, shaped like a palette, on Kammi’s blouse. No doubt she is
wearing a gift from her grandmother. Only a grandmother would give that pin to anyone who truly wanted to be an artist.
    Kammi smiles and Martia hugs her. I slip money from Martia’s outstretched hand into my pocket.
    Â 
    Jinco looks in his rearview mirror when he should be watching the shell road twist and turn in front of the cab. He pretends he’s looking at me, but he’s staring at Kammi, because all the men will gaze at her in the way they’re not supposed to, eyes turned away yet studying her sideways. She’s just a child, they’ll think. They’ll be right, but Kammi already has a sexy look, whether she knows it or not.
    I stare down Jinco when he looks my way. He remembers last year, I know, but he still showed up to meet us at the airport this year, as if this were just another summer and Dad was staying in Maine like he often