The List by Anne Calhoun

control,” Ms. Clark said with immense satisfaction. “They’ll have to carry me out of this apartment in a body bag. Can I get you some tea?”
    Indeed, this was not a situation where one got straight down to business. “I’d love some,” she said.
    She made the effort to look at the canvases on the easels around the large room, but by the time the tea had steeped and Ms. Clark poured two cups, Tilda was back at the table, all but clasping her hands to prevent herself from touching the pages.
    “Thank you,” she said and wrapped her hands around the cup, holding it carefully to avoid spilling tea on the . . . “Ms. Clark, what, exactly, are these?”
    “Call me Sheba.” Tilda felt like she’d been given an immense privilege. “I’ve got fifty-five years of journals, sketchbooks, finished canvases, unfinished canvases. Good old-fashioned experiments. It was time to start doing something with them. Look back at my history, see where I’d been, where I might be going with what’s left of the time God’s given me.”
    Tilda hadn’t felt so off-balance in years, except, perhaps, with Daniel, who in one afternoon knew more about Tilda than any other single person alive except Nan. With a fine disregard for the materials on the table, Sheba set her mug down and pulled forward three pages bound. “Take a look. Stop worrying about the tea, child. If you spill it, the color would just become part of the page.”
    Tilda lifted one of the canvases. Sheba had scraped the painting of the Sheep Meadow in Central Park down to smears of paint on canvas, layered the text from what appeared to be a treatise on botany over it, then somehow erased the text to near invisibility and added several rough sketches and watercolors of the same spot to the canvas.
    The palimpsests both intrigued and confused—or perhaps annoyed—her. Any attempt to make sense of the words and sketches was thwarted by the seemingly random placement, or the juxtaposition of colors, materials, and jumps through time. On the surface, it had no place whatsoever in West Village Stationery.
    Tilda set it down. Picked up her mug of tea, now cool enough to drink. Sipped it. Waited in the silence and sunshine. Picked up a different page in progress, for the moment mostly sky and the Brooklyn Bridge. They made her uncomfortable, with their jumbled images, blended colors, not certain where to rest her eye.
    She couldn’t stop looking at them, and the paper. Thick, sturdy, textured, the edges torn to expose the fibers. She trailed her fingers along one edge, then couldn’t stop touching them.
    “I’m not sure these are right for my shop,” she said finally.
    “I understand,” Sheba said.
    “I’m not sure they’re
wrong
for my shop,” Tilda said.
    “I understand,” Sheba said again.
    What she was sure of is that she had to have them. Couldn’t place why, but the feeling was unmistakable, both discomfiting and commanding. Rather like Daniel, in fact. “Why not use a gallery to sell these? They’d certainly get a more discriminating buyer, have the connections.”
    “Galleries left me behind decades ago,” Sheba said, but her voice wasn’t angry, simply stating a fact. “I don’t see any need to go crawling back to them now. And I like your shop.”
    “You’ve been to my shop?”
    “Walked past,” Sheba said. “The windows are works of art in themselves.”
    “Penny, my designer, does them.” The current displays were of hot air balloons created out of thin papier-mâché, spilling cards into the updrafts to soar with hawks and ravens and other birds of prey over a replica of the city. Penny had a gift Tilda admired but didn’t hope to replicate.
    “I gathered as much. You’re also a work of art, child, but you didn’t create those windows. You’ve got an eye, though, if you hired her.”
    “Thank you, I think,” she said, amused, and sorted through the top layer of pages on the table. Sheba didn’t try to sell her on the work,