Maren laughed, but she didn't answer immediately. The table had become the best work she'd ever made, yet it still hadn't paid for itself. There was another invoice coming due, a costly professional exhibition that might or might not attract a buyer, and a customer list full of people who wanted things much smaller than a twelve-foot table. She asked Luis whether he intended to stay with the shop. He told her he'd had two offers but had declined them for the moment, not out of blind loyalty, but because he wanted to see where this new kind of work could take them.
"If it doesn't sell, we have to talk honestly," he said.
"We will," Maren promised.
I saw the table for the first time on a late afternoon in July. The main bay door stood open, and a strip of sunlight passed across the top at an angle that made the figure seem almost fluid. The charred edge lay dark against the glowing redwood, and the healed ridge through the surface was not hidden but given room to tell its part of the history. The table measured just over twelve feet, with a low steel base that all but disappeared when you stood at the right distance. I walked from one end to the other and found myself changing my pace because the grain kept changing as I moved.
I thought of the auction yard. I thought of Preston tapping the scar twice and then turning his back, and I understood that the difference between those two moments wasn't that Maren had discovered an object no one else could have seen. All of us had seen the same trunk. She had been willing to leave a familiar category long enough to ask what shape the wood had grown into because of its injury. The answer had been waiting inside, but it had taken money, work, patience, expertise, and a willingness to stop cutting for that answer to become visible.
"It's beautiful," I said.
Maren stood beside the table with her hands in her pockets. "That's one question answered."
"What's the next one?"
"Whether the people who need it know it exists."
She registered for an architectural and craft exposition in the Bay Area. The booth fee hurt. Transporting a table of that size required careful planning and another bill she didn't want to see. Two nights in an inexpensive motel added to the cost, and Luis would have to hold the shop together while she was away. Maren went over the numbers at least six times. She asked the exhibition organizer whether material specialists from architecture firms actually attended and received a list that gave her just enough hope to make a difficult decision.
The day before leaving, Annie found her mother rehearsing an explanation in front of the table. Maren was trying to fit the tree's history into a speech short enough to hold the attention of somebody walking a crowded trade floor. Annie listened, frowned, and asked why her mother sounded like a brochure. Maren admitted that she wanted to seem professional. Her daughter said she already was professional, because the table stood there finished, and she ought to tell the story the way she'd told it at their kitchen table.