Prayer by Susan Fanetti Page A

as far as he could as soon as he could, she had stayed close. Their parents were weird, but she loved them.
     
    When she arrived unannounced that afternoon, she came upon her mother standing on a chair in the middle of the living room. The walls and shelves were completely bare, and all of the furniture but that one chair—which belonged in the kitchen—was out of the room.
     
    When Dana saw her, she clapped happily. “Oh good! Hi, darling! You can help!”
     
    Katrynn set her bag down on the floor in the front hall, next to the hall tree. “What are you doing?”
     
    “Living rooms are so boring. No living happens in a living room.”
     
    “Okay…and you’re standing on a chair in the middle of this former living room because…?”
     
    “I’m seeing the space in a new way.”
     
    In her fifties, Dana Page was still a beautiful woman. Slim and small, her natural honey-blonde hair color now maintained with chemical help, she looked younger than her years and acted younger than she looked. She’d always been more friend than authority figure for Katrynn and Will. So had their dad. Unlike their dad, their mom had always been there when they’d needed her.
     
    If her mom was undoing the living room, then her dad was on one of his ‘world tours.’ As tolerant of his wanderings as she had been for almost forty years, they were hard on her, and she coped by remaking their home.
     
    “How long has Dad been gone?”
     
    Her mom smiled breezily down at her. “A couple of weeks. He texted me this morning. He’s in Nova Scotia. He’s trying to get on a fishing boat for the coming spring, but he hasn’t had any luck yet.”
     
    Of course he hadn’t. He was sixty years old. No self-respecting captain would take on a novice of that age. But her dad would keep trying until he got his way or was ready to move on to the next adventure.
     
    “Okay. What can I do?”
     
    “Get a chair and come up here with me. We need to decide what this room is!”
     
     
    ~oOo~
     
     
    They decided it was a studio, and they spent the rest of the afternoon laying a hodgepodge of old rugs on the wood floors, then moving furniture around the funky old house. The sofa and chairs, all the books and LPs, and the ancient stereo console were relegated to Will’s old room, which was now the ‘library.’
     
    The new ‘studio’ had a couple of heavily-used easels Dana had picked up long ago at a rummage sale, brought home and leaned against a wall in the garage, and promptly forgotten about. She didn’t paint, but now she would start, and knowing her, she’d be great at it. She was great at everything she tried, but she could never focus for very long on any one thing.
     
    They also muscled the old upright piano from the hallway into the studio. And set up a couple of tattered but comfy chairs, and filled the built-in shelves with whatever had been lying around and seemed ‘artsy.’
     
    They took all the shades and sheers down from the windows, too. The room had been blinding bright all afternoon. When they were done, the new studio was pretty darn cute. Katrynn’s mom made a show of brushing dust from her hands. “There! Perfect!”
     
    The sun was setting on a clear, false spring day, and the glow washed the room in a rosy-warm hue.
     
    “It looks pretty good, I have to admit.” Katrynn went to the piano and brushed her hand over the rough wood of the key slip. The piece badly needed to be sanded and refinished, but it would only happen if that particular bee found its way into her mother’s bonnet.
     
    “Look at that sunset! I’ll make us some dinner. Will you play while I cook?”
     
    One of the things her mother was great at was piano. Of all her many jobs, piano teacher was among the most regular, and she’d taught both Will and Katrynn how to play. Will had resented it, but Katrynn had enjoyed it. There had never been a television in the Page home—or, until Katrynn had been a senior in high school, a