The Buddha

Their day began with a trip to the community college Fine Arts building. Mom, Collette, Francis, Linnea, and Puck were to meet Joe at the entrance where his first piece of art for Drawing I was displayed on the wall. He had already shown them a small picture of it from before, taken with his cell phone.
“You didn’t draw that, Joe,” Mom said, “come on.”
Collette and Carrie didn’t believe it either. He was good, but not that good.
“I did; I promise,” Joe insisted, though not adamantly.
So they all drove over to get a look at it for themselves. Collette walked Puck past the brown lake of splashing fountains, under the heat of another warm September morning. Puck was very interested in watching the honking geese in the sky, and not quite as interested in the cool air conditioned lobby of the art building.
But once inside, there it was. Joe’s drawing – with the others.
It was very good. Apparently, the class had been commissioned to draw and shade a small statue of a Buddha sitting next to a plant with a sort of dark brown chalk. And without being too biased, Collette had to admit that his was probably the best rendering on the wall.
After the viewing, it was back to the house for an afternoon of tutoring, while Francis seemed very concentrated on slurping hot chocolate out of a plastic cup with a spoon. And Puck, sitting on the bench next to “Lee-Lee” tried to take a chomp out of her open math notebook sitting an inch away from his mouth. Linnea giggled and traded him for a handful of pretzel sticks from Collette.
Somehow Puck had also found a pile of markers. Collette had heard it described somewhere before as a “walking color chart”; that was Puck. Green and orange doodles on his legs.
Back home while Collette prepared his dinner, Puck climbed up onto his grandma’s old vanity with a closed jar of peanut butter in his lap and happily pulled the chain on the lamp next to him – off and on, off and on, off and on.