Phil Parisi

The next week, we were on a Zoom call with some fellow starving artists, all of us just yakking about what we were up to.

I myself was struggling with bleak urban cityscapes done in charcoal and working at another call center to make ends meet.

And Tess confessed she'd developed a real thing for chairs, suddenly.

She'd gotten two more from a thrift store and was having fun restoring them, her new little hobby.

She said she might give the best one to a very proud homeless woman she'd become aware of, who lived mostly in the woods behind her development.

Problem was, Tess really just felt like playing around with restorations, and not the work that defined her life, so she laughed about that and made us swear that if she ever brought up the chairs again, we'd slap her wrist, tell her to get on the stick.

She wanted to blame it on watching too much Downton Abbey and eyeballing all that great old-school furniture.

The holidays went by, and I got a message from Tess the second week of January.

She was wondering if she could pay me, or maybe my fiancé, a little something to hand pose.

She'd gotten a tiny commission for a hands series for a medical journal.

I said, sure.

I'd just sit there for two hours, and we'd gossip about the other people in the Zoom group.

And she'd sketch, and she'd force 50 bucks on me for my trouble.

Just enough cash to keep my phone from being shut off.

So I drove out to Lighthouse Passage 2, that was the name of the development, with the nearest actual lighthouse being about 200 miles away.

I got there after dinner, after dark, and my first thought was that Tess wasn't looking so good.

Kind of ill, run down.

She was even moving a little slow.

I asked her if she felt okay, and she tried to brush it off, but she admitted her thoughts seemed to be all over the place recently.

She didn't have much reason to be depressed.