Page 69 of Please Send Snow
“Just about every year he made a handful of figures,” Eleanor explains as my feet carry me toward the tables where dozens of clay sculptures are displayed. “A few went on to be annual releases, but the ones that are still here were never used. Your dad was a prolific artist.”
“Wow,” I say, smiling at a koala mama with a baby on her back and a little wreath on her head. “I can’t believe this.”
“There’s something else too,” Eleanor says. “You know Teresa’s a wonder at painting. She’s been trying her hand at sculpting just for fun for the last few years, even took classes at the local arts center. She finally got up the nerve to show your father her work the last time he was up here. He told her that if she kept it up she would have her own line. Of course her work is nothing like what your father could do, but we all think her figures are very sweet.”
I head to the little table set up in the corner and I’m blown away.
A family of little gingerbread people are captured in various activities. One is holding a gingerbread baby, oneis rolling out cookie dough, and another is slipping a candy cane into a stocking.
“They’re incredible,” I tell Eleanor truthfully. “Teresa has a real gift.”
“We all think so too,” Eleanor tells me with a warm smile.
“So we do have new figures,” I realize out loud. “We have plenty of new figures, and we even have a new line.”
“This factory also has something else,” Eleanor tells me. “It owns the trademark for the company name. The rest were just branches of this original location.”
“So we can keep going,” I say. “We can keep this place going even if Delilah shuts the rest of them down.”
“You sure can,” Eleanor tells me. “If you want to, that is.”
“Of course I want to keep it,” I tell her. “More than anything.”
“Then it sounds like he left you just what you wanted,” she says.
“Let’s tell the others,” I tell her.
“There’s one more thing that might be useful to you,” she says, heading right instead of left as we leave the studio.
I follow her up a staircase and at the top she opens a door to reveal a tiny apartment.
It’s on the corner of the building, so there’s a beautiful vista of the snow coming down hard on the trees outside the windows in the small living room and kitchenette.
There’s a bed on the opposite wall, and a door to what I can see from here is a bathroom with a clawfoot tub.
And right by the big window on the living room wall,there’s a desk with a lamp and a large framed copy of the photo of me with my parents on that carriage ride that I’ve been carrying with me everywhere.
“Dad,” I sigh.
All the puzzle pieces start to click together in my mind now.
The way he talked about Angel Mountain being my home—he meant itliterally.
I always knew that being responsible for a huge international company was overwhelming to him. I heard him say more than once that he wished he could just go back to the old days and concentrate on sculpting. He never cared about the money. And he raised me so that I wouldn’t either.
My father didn’t forget me in his will.
He wasn’t taking anything away from me when he left the company to Delilah. He wasunburdeningme, giving me the opportunity to live a creative life that was simpler and happier than his.
What I’m looking at here is my chance to work on my book and spend time with people I care about, instead of being rushed off on flights across the ocean and badgered in conference calls.
The factory here will earn enough to cover my needs, and the women here are like family to me. This is the perfect place to heal and be happy. It’s the most beautiful inheritance I can imagine. And he built it for me long before he left me.
“He wanted this for me,” I say softly. “He gave me the best of what he built, and nothing more.”
“He loved you with everything he had, Maddie girl,”Eleanor says. “And he was incredibly proud of you. He hoped you would sit at that desk and dream up a hundred wonderful stories, just like he sculpted a hundred animals in the studio downstairs. He was planning to bring you here and show you everything once you were finished with school, but he never got that chance.”
“I can’t believe it,” I murmur.
