Girls' Night Out by Kate Flora Page A

large gray eyes glazed with pain and shock, underlined by circles as dark as a kindergartner’s drawing of a football player. She’d clamped her lips tight and pressed a fist against them in a failed effort to still their trembling. Sun glinted off the tracks of silver tears. Ellen looked ten years older. She looked like she’d been hit by a truck.
    Heat from the pan burned through the potholders, and I dropped the cake. In a rush, I swept it up onto the counter with a small wisp of gratitude that it had fallen pan side down. I snapped off the news, stopping Hanrahan in midsentence, and went to my studio, closing the door firmly on the house, the news, the awful stuff of everyday life. Book group wasn’t coming till 7:30. I had a few hours to put some work between myself and the look on Ellen’s face.
    I paint flowers, an accurate if oddly Victorian way to put it. They painted prim little flowers. I paint large canvases of gorgeous, gaudy, somewhat erotic blooms that work well with a variety of decors. Although I had once jokingly told an interviewer that if Thomas Kinkade was “the painter of light,” I was the painter of boudoirs, I’d always regretted saying that. I hate being put in any box. In my artist’s statement, I spoke about technique and about texture and light. About intention. About my interaction with the viewer. I took serious pleasure in creating flowers more perfect and real than the real. Flowers that evoked an emotional response. At shows, people reached out to touch them or leaned in to smell them. They smiled and sighed with pleasure.
    But I wasn’t just a housewife who dabbled or an aspiring painter with another career. I’d put in my time as waitress and receptionist. I’d hidden my irritation, frustration, and weariness behind a faux smile until I was able to leave that behind. This was my job as well as my passion. Painting what sold paid the mortgage. Just like my friend the glassblower, who called cobalt “cash flow blue,” I knew that if I painted roses they would sell. But not the roses I was painting today.
    My palette was normally soft and rich—hues of pink, rose, and ivory or creamy peaches and apricots, large, closely focused portraits of unfolding flowers. One of my favorites, a blowsy four-by-five-foot bouquet of peonies in a celadon vase, hung over my fireplace.
    Today, everything was stark white and blood red, a single, enormous rose on a strong green stem, rich, gleaming velvet petals touched with quivering drops of dew, as wet and perfect as drops of blood, standing in a pure white art deco vase. Then a second painting, the perfect rose savaged, petals crushed and torn away, bruised to deeper, blackened shades of red, falling through the air and scattered onto a white damask tablecloth, the bruised petals curling protectively inward.
    Later, my white shirt spattered with the symbolic gore of the rose’s evisceration, I went to clean up and get ready for book group. Tonight we would be discussing Proust’s Within a Budding Grove. I needed to clear my head, chill the wine, and warm the cheese, to embrace the acute and obsessive observations of Proust’s character and keep my distance from Ellen’s face.

    ***

    Ellen might have been in the room, in all of our heads, but no one mentioned her until I served dessert, a peach and raspberry upside-down cake I’d invented, topped with fresh whipped cream. Normally, my friends fell greedily on whatever I baked, which was lucky for them and for me. It was no fun to cook for people who only pushed food around on their plates. But Callie, Georgia, Suzan, and Tess swore they never ate at all on the days book group met at my house, saving themselves for the hors d’oeuvres and dessert. Maybe that was why our group had lasted so long.
    During our senior year in college, we’d started it as a spoof on our mothers’ nice social lives. We’d sit around