Harmony House is now available anywhere you buy books. If you’ve read and enjoyed it, it would mean the world to me if you went out to Goodreads and left a review. This is the single best was to help other folks find my book.
Daedalia is a serialized novel, with a new chapter released every Monday morning. The story is designed to unfold slowly, the days in between, a space for it to settle into your imagination. Each chapter is a 10–15 minute read/listen. Check out the Table of Contents if you want to jump to a specific chapter. Want something to binge while you wait? Three novels, complete with audio narration are ready for you to dive in.
Previously…
Kelly, restored by Lefty's visit, threw herself into a new and darker series over a grueling seven-month stretch at the studio, while Lefty wrestled with whether the uncommercial direction would serve or threaten their ascent. The chapter closed on Marabelle finally asking her mother, point blank, why she'd had her and why her art mattered more, drawing out an honest answer that revealed Kelly feared losing herself as much as she feared losing Marabelle.
The community art project went on for almost three months. Three days a week Kelly would open the shed and invite Maria’s family to make art with her. Sometimes they brought friends. Sometimes adults came along and participated. The pieces they produced began to stack up like cord wood around the walls of the studio and the question on everyone’s mind was: what were we going to do with all of it?
“Why can’t we sell them down at the gallery?” Kelly asked one evening as we were finishing dinner.
Lefty sighed and put his fork down. “You know why,” he said. “The point of the gallery was to be a decoy, a distraction, and we don’t really need that now. All it will do is draw attention back to us. We can’t have that again.”
Kelly had no response to this. How could she? Her guilt over what happened to me was a leash and all Lefty had to do was tug it once to remind her. But I had nothing holding me back.
“Why is it always your way, Daddy? Why does everybody have to do what you say? It’s not fair. We made those paintings with Mom — me and the other kids. What if they want people to see?”
“Mare, this is between me and your mother. You don’t get a say because you don’t fully understand the situation.”
“You’re mean and you just want to keep everything a secret. You just want to keep everything for yourself.”
“You see what you’ve done with your little project?” Lefty said, his eyes focused on Kelly, who was poking her knife into what remained of a pork chop. She didn’t look up, so he continued. “Look, I know this has been fun and it’s been great to have everyone involved. You’ve done a kind thing for these kids, exposing them to art, but…”
“That’s not the only thing I was trying to do. You know there’s nine of them living in Maria’s two-bedroom apartment? Nine.”
“I do. Why do you think I’ve been making up projects for Enrique and Luis to do around here? If you want, we can just buy them a house. Wouldn’t that be better?”
“No, it wouldn’t. You can’t just pay everyone off. It doesn’t work like that. It’s about more than money. It’s about these kids and their parents feeling seen — their story being validated.”
“I don’t think we’re talking about Maria’s family anymore,” he said, pushing back from the table and taking his plate to the sink.
I knew a fight was coming, and I left the table without a word, retreating to my room where I could escape into the world of Mario and Luigi, a place where any obstacle could easily be overcome by mashing a button. But no matter how loud I turned up the volume, I could still hear them.
“FUCK YOU, LEFTY. I’m not your goddamned singing frog you can keep in a box and take out whenever it suits you.”
“Should I remind you that this was all your idea? The whole damned thing. Not mine. Not mine, Kelly.”
“Oh, but you’ve run with it, haven’t you? You built your own fucking empire on my work. My work. Not fucking Daedalia’s work, my work. Why shouldn’t I get credit for my work? Isn’t that a normal thing for someone to want?”
“You know it doesn’t work like that now. Why are you so conveniently blind when you want to be? You can see amazing things no one else can, but when it comes to the obvious things, you’re a complete child.”
“What are you afraid of, Lefty? What? And don’t say it’s Marabelle’s safety. I’ve paid and paid for what happened, and that’s not what this is about.”
Was he afraid? I didn’t know. I didn’t think my father was afraid of anything. I really wanted to know how he would answer this question, but they had moved into the living room. I turned the volume down and pressed my ear to the door.
“...won’t accept you and I couldn’t bear that,” I heard him say.
It was quiet after that. I’m not sure if my mother was whispering or crying or just didn’t have anything to say in response. An hour later Lefty came in to get me to turn the TV off and go to bed. His face looked sad and tired as he leaned in the doorframe of my bathroom while I brushed my teeth.
“I’m sorry you had to hear all that,” he said. “Mommy and I fight sometimes, and it sounds really horrible, but it doesn’t mean we don’t love each other.”
“Where is she? Did she go away?”
“No, sweetheart. She didn’t go anywhere. I’ll send her in to say goodnight.”
“Daddy, why can’t people know Mommy is Daedalia?”
I’m sure I had asked him some version of this question hundreds of times before, but this time it landed differently, and he didn’t have a ready answer. He came in and sat down on the toilet seat.
“It’s complicated, Mare. You get that, right? Daedalia’s work is known all over the world. She’s more of an idea than a person…”
“Like Santa Claus?” I asked.
“Kind of. Let’s go with that. Let’s say that tomorrow, Enrique told all of us that he was actually Santa Claus, and he had been keeping it a secret all these years, but now he was just here, living in New Mexico, painting houses and building decks? How would that make you feel?”
“Well, I don’t really believe in Santa Claus anymore…”
“Okay, but what if you still did. What if you were seven and not ten?”
“I guess I would be disappointed.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know because Enrique doesn’t look like Santa. He doesn’t have a big belly and a beard. He doesn’t live at the North Pole.”
“Exactly right. That’s how people all over the world would probably react if they found out that your mommy is Daedalia. They’d be disappointed and…”
“That would hurt mommy’s feelings.”
“Yeah, I think it would. You and I know how special mommy is and not just because she makes amazing paintings. But they won’t know that.”
A few minutes later, when I was in bed with the moon nightlight glowing on the opposite wall, my mother came in.
“Scooch over?” she asked, kneeling beside me.
I made room for her, and she crawled into bed next to me. She put her arms around me and spooned me. I was getting too big for such things, but I allowed it.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“Yes, sweetie. I’m fine. You know we fight sometimes. It doesn’t mean anything, and it’s certainly not your fault.”
“Are you going to go away again?”
“Oh no, sweetheart. I won’t do that again. I’m so sorry. That wasn’t fair to you. What can I ever do to make it up to you?”
“Why did you start doing the art project with Maria’s family?”
“I don’t know exactly. It was probably a dumb idea, wasn’t it?”
“No, I think it’s really cool. I just wanted to know why because you can make good art all by yourself.”
“It gets lonely making it all by myself sometimes.”
“Like when you were in New York City?”
“Yes, exactly like that.”
“But you could’ve come home if you wanted to…”
“You’re right, but it would’ve been hard.”
“How come?”
“Well, it’s really hard to explain, but you know what it’s like when you’re mad and you need some time to get unmad or like when you’ve got a tummy ache and you have to throw up but you don’t want to?”
I nodded.
“If I had come home feeling like that, it would have made everything worse. I make art because it makes me better. It helps me work out things that get trapped inside me and make me feel bad. Remember when you had that high fever back in the winter and you were shivering? You couldn’t control it. What happens to me is kind of like that, and the art makes the fever go away.”
My mother was really good at explaining things that couldn’t be explained. It might have been her greatest gift if you didn’t count her artistic ability.
A few weeks later, Lefty and Kelly staged a big opening night at our little gallery downtown to unveil the paintings. Like the paintings, the event was a communal effort with everyone pitching in to hang the pieces, decorate the space, and get the word out. I went around town with the other kids handing out flyers to all the shops and restaurants. We called our show: Desert. Family. Home.. It was the youngest child, Sissy (short for Cecelia), who got credit for the name, though like everything else about the project, we had done it together. At Kelly’s prompting, we all wrote down three words that described what the paintings meant to us, and the slips of paper were put into three buckets. It was Sissy’s job to pick a word from each bucket. I was happy when one of her little hands fished out the word I felt most deeply when I had scrawled it in my careful hand. Home.
We had spent all of that Saturday setting things up and then went home to shower and get ready for the big night. When we drove back into town, the sun was low on the horizon, dropping into the notch between two mesas. My mother sat in the backseat with me and held my hand. Maria sat in the passenger seat. Lefty put on a Paul Simon CD, and we listened to it all the way into town. He sang all the words that needed to be said. Maria had fixed my hair and my mother’s. We had matching gardenias, and the fragrance filled the car. In the rearview mirror I saw my father’s eye meet my mother’s, and he smiled. Whatever they had needed to work out, they had.
We parked down the block from the gallery. The sidewalk was busy with tourists as it always is in summer. Maria rushed ahead to bring flowers to adorn the hair of her two nieces. I walked between my parents, and we held hands. It was dusk, and the sky was an azure blue deepening to black. Before we crossed the street to make our way over to the gallery, my father stopped us. The gallery windows glowed with a warm custard light, a composite of the vivid, primary hues that filled the many canvases that covered the walls. Unlike a Daedalia show, there was no mystery here, no hushed, darkened, industrial space, or haunting music. No Prosecco and canapés. No critics or journalists queuing up on the sidewalk. The gallery door was open, and the bright, jangly sound of Luis’s guitar strumming bounced across the pavement.
“Let’s wait just a minute,” my father said. “This is always my favorite part, but I’m usually by myself.”
I didn’t know exactly what he meant, but he squeezed my hand and when I looked up, I could see his eyes were glistening. My mother wasn’t looking at him or at me. She was looking across the street at the stenciled sign in the window:
Desert. Family. Home.
A Santa Fe Community Project
Inspired by Artist K.A. Mudd
There wasn’t a crowd of strangers, but family and friends of friends when we finally went inside. Us kids posed for pictures on demand in front of the paintings. The adults drank beer from a keg in the back room, laughed, and talked loudly to be heard over Luis’s guitar. I wandered from canvas to canvas accompanied by Maria’s nephew, Rocky, who was closest to my age. We tried to pretend we were grown-ups as we appraised the paintings and tried to remember which parts we had contributed. It wasn’t easy to do. While it was all there, our crude stamps, smears, and splatters had been smoothed, shaped, and transformed beneath my mother’s expert hand.
One of the paintings hangs in my front hall today, and sometimes, when I’m taking off my shoes after a long day, I will pause and look at this Daedalia that no dealer ever appraised. No piece in that show sold for more than a couple thousand dollars, and it took months for them all to find homes, but all the money went to Maria’s family. With it, they were able to make a down payment on some land and a small house.
On a cold night near the end of her life, as I spooned some warm chicken broth to my mother’s lips, I asked her what had made her decide to do the project.
“I needed to feel something more than that relentless gnawing inside me that never seemed to let me rest. You children, you did that for me.”
With the exception of those few months when I was ten years old, my mother’s work was always guided by whatever unknown force consumed her and propelled her to people and places that needed to be seen — to be excavated by her talent. But the Desert. Family. Home. project was one she chose of her own free will.
I’ll never really know how it felt for her, seeing those pieces hang in our little family gallery for months after the show, collecting dust. Had she expected the world to open up to them as it did for the Daedalia pieces, or did she understand she was making a trade? Did she have such control of her gift that she could deliberately throttle the magic to appease my father? It’s impossible to say, but I don’t think so. I believe sometimes she was the horse and sometimes she was the rider, but either way, she was always running.
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I’m so glad she got to have the gallery opening and show. I love the way she explains to Marabelle what happens to her in the throes of creating. Her muse is more demanding than mine — or she’s more willing to give over to it fully. The hype world of high-end art collecting is nicely contrasted with this humble community project. It seems that Kelly is beginning to make peace with the arbitrary way art is valued. Reminds me of Tom Wolfe’s books.