One day during a walk with my sister Viv, she said, “I told Bob he can have Agnes’s painting when Dad dies.” I stopped walking. My father was still very much alive. That painting was the only family treasure. When I could breathe normally, I said, “You gave it to Bob without talking to me first?” Viv said, “You don’t care about that painting.”
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My siblings were older, so I spent a lot of time home alone with my mother when I was a kid. Mom was not a happy woman, so I drew and painted at the coffee table hoping that when I lost myself in concentration, I would be invisible.
Agnes was my father’s older sister who looked out for him after their mother died when he was ten. She became an art teacher, died when my father was twenty-one, and left behind a two-year-old son, Bob. Agnes’s painting was a gateway for me into my father’s past which had been delightful until it was traumatic.
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