Part 4
Ruth lowered her hand and let them go. She waited until Dana had backed out before putting the roll of artwork in the van. Its crushed edge scraped against the headliner, and for once she left it crushed.
On Thursday morning she returned alone, carrying the revised drawings and an empty frame cut to the proposed opening’s size. Celia had reserved time with Ben and a facilities supervisor. Before Ruth unrolled anything, she asked for a chair.
They placed it where a visitor could sit without blocking the walkway. Ruth held the frame low, then farther to the side, while the supervisor marked possible positions on removable tape. From one angle she could see part of the resting ledge. From another, she could see the path Boone would use to leave it.
“Your trees don’t have to fit around this,” Ben said.
Ruth looked at the expensive printed panels stacked against the wall. She had made the branches spread toward a clear central space, a composition that led the eye exactly where she now needed to put cover. A narrower opening would chop through the design.
“No,” she said. “They don’t.”
Celia approved leaving the temporary cover while the keepers continued their observations. Boone had used the sheltered end of the ledge earlier that morning, she said. He was outside now, occupied with the troop. There was no reason to interrupt that for the meeting.
The permanent layout would restore substantial cover, with a modest viewing opening at one side. Facilities would check the mounting and clearances before anything was fixed in place. Ruth could supply plain opaque material immediately; new decorative work could wait until the staff had seen enough ordinary days to judge the arrangement.
Ben took out his pencil. “Tell me what we can use from what’s already paid for.”
They went through it together. Most of the wall panels could stay. The window design couldn’t. Ruth set aside the invoice for that portion and wrote down the replacement cost, including the work she would have to do again.
Ben offered to divide the extra material expense. His approval had let the omission through, he said, and the zoo should bear its part. Ruth accepted. Then she crossed out the labor charge for installing the replacement and subtracted the unused window artwork from her remaining bill.
“You did print it,” Ben said.
“You can’t use it.”
Her share would cost her the secondhand adjustable worktable she’d found through a shop closing in Washington. She had already measured the space for it, hoping to stop wrestling large panels on folding trestles. That evening she would have to tell the seller he could offer it to somebody else.
Ruth put the corrected invoice in Ben’s folder before she could start explaining how narrow her margin had been. When she went to carry out the discarded panels, he took the other end without asking. They got them through the doorway together.
At home she found Willa’s paper bracelet behind the workbench lamp. It had flattened on one side. Ruth reached to open it out, then put it back and called Dana.
Her daughter answered over the sound of running water. Ruth told her the room would have cover again, and that the zoo had agreed to leave the decoration unfinished while it was checked. Dana said she was glad. She didn’t ask whether Friday could be saved.
“Did you like coming to the shop?” Ruth asked.
The water stopped. “Sometimes.”
“You were always so good at it.”
“I liked painting the peaches. On those farmstand signs.” Dana paused. “You’d take the brush back for the last bits. I always wanted to do the last bits.”
Ruth remembered the signs perfectly: a shallow wooden crate, green leaves, a peach sliced open to show its red center. She’d thought of those final brushstrokes as the difference between a hobby and something a customer would pay for. Dana had been twelve, sitting on a stool too high for her feet to reach the floor.
“I wish you’d said.”
“I did, Mom.”
Ruth stayed quiet. She could hear a cupboard closing at Dana’s end, then Willa asking whether somebody had moved her library bag. Life in the house was carrying on around the phone call, and Ruth was grateful her daughter hadn’t taken it into another room.
When Willa came to the phone, Ruth apologized for making her move at the zoo. She said the girl had already been able to see, and she’d been wrong to act as if that wasn’t enough.
“Are you still mad?” Willa asked.
“At you? No.” Ruth gripped the edge of the workbench. “I sounded like I was. I’m sorry.”
“I wanted to sit by him. I wasn’t making a picture.”
“I know.”
Ruth stopped there. She didn’t describe her childhood or the money or how excited she’d been to show Dana something good. Willa asked whether Celia had kept the cardboard, and Ruth explained about the temporary cover and the ledge Boone had used that morning.
“Do I have to go Friday?”
“No. You don’t have to go back at all.”
Willa was quiet long enough that Ruth almost offered the gift shop. Then the girl asked if Ruth still had the blue pouch. Ruth said it was beside her. Willa asked her not to throw it away.
On Friday the approved plain panels were secured outside the glass. Ruth had left enough room around the viewing position for people to move without trapping anyone against the rail. The facilities supervisor checked the finished installation, and Celia walked the public route before allowing the small group in.
The empty space on the wall bothered Ruth. She had painted a clean rectangle where her elaborate trees should have been, and the difference showed under the gallery lights. Ben said it could remain bare until the animal-care team settled on the final arrangement. Ruth packed the bright replacement lettering she’d brought anyway into her case.
Through the low opening, she saw Boone on the ledge with his burlap. He shifted once, turned his head toward the visitor entrance, and got up. By the time Ben opened the gallery door, only the folded cloth remained.
Ruth’s hand went to her phone. Willa was getting out of school soon; Dana might have been willing to bring her for ten minutes. Ruth took her hand out of her pocket and moved the empty folding stool out of the entrance instead.
A man in the first group bent toward the opening. He straightened, looked at the broad opaque panel, and turned to Ruth. “Could you move that so we can see him?”
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