She stood painting at an easel in a valley in the desert. Her fingers were streaked with blotches of umber. Her boots were spattered with drops of fuchsia. Theodore lay napping on a blanket in the dirt, resting with his face under the shade of a straw hat and his hands folded together over the buttons on the belly of his shirt. She was amazed by how much life there was in the desert. A lizard with pink-orange scales that darted across the dirt toward a flowering cactus, and a gleaming emerald-citrine beetle that tottered across a stone, and a shiny bister-maroon ant that crawled through some pebbles, and finches with crimson-pink throats that flitted through the branches of a juniper tree with a gnarled trunk, and a jackrabbit with pink-cream ears that hopped out from behind a yucca, and a gray-brown coyote that trotted through the sagebrush in the distance before vanishing, and beyond all of that, on the horizon, colossal sandstone mesas rising high above the valley. A warm breeze blew. Clara could smell the sweet fragrant scent of the dirt. She drank a sip of water, gazing at the landscape with a sense of calm, and then she reached for a paintbrush, tucking a loose strand of hair behind her ear.