Silver Alert by Lee Smith

Author:Lee Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Published: 2023-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Primary Colors

Today it’s a beautiful scene, like a French Impressionist painting. No: maybe Gauguin, or one of those Haitian paintings that Susan used to sell in her art gallery, or Louis’s own work—primitive, colorful, fauve. Red and purple bougainvillea spills over the high pink stucco wall encircling the garden, buttonwood trees with their furry leaves form a silver hedge beneath. Notice the border of tropical plants: the prehistoric-looking elephant ear, the huge ferns, the big green cactus with all those spikes, the scary crown of thorns, the lignum vitae signifying death and, ironically, memory. Susan created this garden herself when Herbert Atlas bought her this home fifteen years ago. She used to delight in telling visitors, “See, look here—anything you’d think of as a house plant back home is a tree down here in Key West! Everything is enormous! Why, look at this bush, it’s actually a coleus, just a little old coleus like the one I used to have in a pot on the windowsill in my kitchen. And look at this cactus—it could kill you! Can you believe it?”

Squares of emerald grass, trucked in fully grown and thriving, are lush and green as Ireland, thanks to an almost-invisible 24-hour sprinkler system, which works on a timer, like magic, now sprinkling the little butterfly garden to the side, with its Monarchs and Buckeyes and Swallowtails fluttering among the lantana and salvia they love, this butterfly garden being Susan’s last addition to the garden before her onset—and all, all in the dappled shade of the giant strangler fig tree, its wide, leafy branches embracing everything. Susan sits at her easel enthralled, making swirls and slashes with an orange marker, Ashley and Abe in the Adirondack chairs observing her.

Ashley personally hates this outdoor garden, which she feels is too vivid—tasteless, lurid, and even dangerous—why, one of these plants is actually carnivorous! Susan said so herself! And today Susan is wearing a tacky turquoise sun hat with sequins on it, which Ashley would like to jerk right off her head. Ashley is absolutely sure that tacky little mani-pedi girl bought it for her. Probably at Wal-Mart! And really, this whole thing with the girl has gone on way too long already, it has gotten entirely out of hand. . . . Susan leans forward, clutching the easel with her left hand while she slashes and swipes at the paper with the orange marker in her right hand, biting her lip in concentration. (But can she actually concentrate? Isn’t she too far gone?)

An awful thought comes to Ashley then, as unbidden as the Monarch butterfly fluttering in the fragrant air before her. She grabs her husband’s sleeve.

“Abe, honey, maybe we’re making a mistake!” she whispers. “Maybe she’s not as far gone as we thought. Did you think she could do this? Honestly now. Aren’t you surprised?”

“Yes and no,” Abe says in that calm, doctoral voice, which can always settle Ashley down.

“But we are not making a mistake, darling. You have to remember how

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