Art's Blood Read Online Free Page A

their fields over to flowers and herbs.
    Now, after some lean years, Full Circle Farm’s fresh herbs and edible flowers were in constant demand among Asheville’s growing number of trendy restaurants. And the luxuriant wreaths of dried flowers and herbs that Elizabeth designed and constructed in her workshop, with part-time help when big orders came in, sold briskly.
    The work kept me going, the work and the girls…. It’ll be six years in December, she thought, as she turned out the bathroom light and sought the comfort of the old brass bed. Sam was whistling “Good King Wenceslas” as he headed out the door. And that was the last time I saw him.
    Six years ago, Sam had died in the crash of a friend’s small plane. And she had gone on.

    * * *
    Monday morning came and with it a necessary trip into Asheville for various items unattainable in Ransom. Most of her errands accomplished, Elizabeth swung by her daughter’s studio, hoping to take her to lunch. Laurel’s mixed-media work, requiring ever larger canvases or wooden panels, as well as a flea market’s worth of odds and ends— found objects, Mum, they’re called objets trouvés— had overflowed her tiny Asheville apartment. Finally she had rented a space in the River District where a motley collection of old warehouses and mills had been reborn as studios for much of Asheville’s thriving art community.
    The district was a bit of a mixed bag: spread over several miles along railroad tracks that ran near the French Broad River, it contained some carefully restored buildings, some that were minimally habitable, and some that were empty ruins; the majority, however, were simply aging structures that had been brought into compliance with code as cheaply as possible in order to be reborn as low-rent studios.
    The space Laurel had taken was in The Wedge— a three-storied clump of buildings that housed potters, fiber artists, painters, a world dance studio, and four sculptors, including one whose raw material was steel. Elizabeth had visited briefly when Laurel had moved in and had come away with the impression of a busy, if assuredly eccentric, community. It really gets you fired up, Mum, being around other artists, Laurel had explained. If you’re working hard, no one will bother you. But if you lose momentum, all you have to do is walk down the hall— there’s a communal kitchen where you can fix a cup of tea or something to eat— and you’ll always find someone to talk to.
    She found her daughter in the parking lot behind The Wedge, standing beside her recently acquired secondhand VW van. Ragged overalls splattered with bright paint hung loosely on her spare frame. A greasy young man was deep in the tiny engine compartment, and as Elizabeth approached he withdrew his head and held up some unidentifiable engine part. “Fahrvergnugen!” he declared, and flashed a dazzling grin before plunging back into the bowels of the van.
    “Oh, Mum, thank god you’re here!” Laurel scooped her knapsack from the cracked pavement and loped toward the jeep. “Can you give me a ride down to the junkyard? I promised Rafiq I’d be there at noon and Milo says he has to rebuild the engine before the van’ll move.”
    Elizabeth forbore saying that she had warned Laurel that old VW vans were notoriously unreliable, that she and Sam had had one, possibly even this same one, twenty years ago, and it had given them nothing but grief. Like her parents before her, Laurel had been seduced by the cozy little camper setup, and, with visions of a cross-country trip luring her on, she had traded her aging but reliable Subaru for this hippie cliché.
    “The junkyard?” Elizabeth frowned at her daughter. “I was thinking more along the lines of maybe going somewhere for sushi.”
    “We can do that after.” Laurel settled herself in the passenger seat. “Let’s just get going and I’ll tell you about it on the way.”
    During the drive to the junkyard, Laurel explained that