She loves it, her garage. Every time she comes home, every time she rounds the last curve and it comes sneaking into view, bit by bit, her toy garage, the hottest, deepest wish of her childhood, a thrill contracts her chest and flushes her face.

A triptych: 

The summer turns to autumn and the richly toned leaves that float down off the trees are raked into small banks along the edges of the parking lot. She carves pumpkins and strings up garlands with a turkey motif. She moves her easel into the showroom, painting next to the window. She waves when a passing car honks hello. 

The autumn turns to winter and she places a row of poinsettias in the windows of her showroom and strings up lights. Early afternoon finds her painting next to the windows surrounded by space heaters and endless, steaming cups of tea. A snowless Christmas and New Year's comes and goes, and the blank canvas wrapped in shiny gift paper and huge red ribbon that has motivated a least a few extra sales is taken down and hidden away at the back of the mini-cellar next to the silent, shrouded dollhouse. 

Bird song in the early mornings and a sudden ant plague in her bathroom announce the annual thaw. Soon, she buttons on her smock again and moves her easel outside into the timid, fleet-footed light of a new spring.

She is happy.

The newspaper article which brought her a number of new customers, some of them with much bigger wallets than she would have guessed from their mud-caked boots and faded lumberjack flannels, still sits on her desk in a sealed, stamped envelope addressed to the Mother and Father.

She doesn't know why she can't send it.

Artistic success is within her grasp now. She's independent and, as far as she can tell, more or less respected for what she does. Why is she still hesitating?

During the monthly telephone calls, she continues to stuff the Mother full of fantasies of dollhouses she'll never see or inhabit. Moves her imagination up staircases and down again, opens doors and cabinets, peers inside, steps over the sleeping dog in front of the fire, places the pie on the window sill to cool, sets the breakfast table for the dollhouse family like is wanted, expected, loved. It's just easier this way.

She has her fantasy and I have mine. It would be cruel to rob her of hers, she rationalizes to the garage at night. But she never wanted to let you have yours, the garage answers back, she only wanted you to come and play in hers. She won't stop until you stop.

The Daughter shakes her head, turns over.

You actually live in the toy you were never supposed to have, remember? continues the garage, not caring if she listens or not, it has to get this off its chest. Don't you think there will come a day when you are going to have to own up to all of this like an adult?

It's been a year now. A year in her new life and she feels like celebrating.

The announcement for the opening of her first public show appears in the local paper. Invitations to the vernissage are mailed out to her best customers and supporters in envelopes with individual, hand-drawn pictures on them.

The Daughter stands in front of an entire herd of canvases that have been multiplying in the drying rack during the dark part of the year, and shakes her head. There are enough to fill her display space three times over. Has she been that productive?

She enlists the help of Clover, a skinny teenager with lank hair and an over-fondness for mascara, to help with preparations. Clover is one of the Daughter's most frequent visitors. She wants to know absolutely everything about being an artist. Sometimes she asks the exact same questions the Daughter remembers asking her own teachers. For some of them, she has her own answers now. For others, she still doesn't know.

Clover likes the Daughter's "Tree Portraits" best. The Daughter is partial to her socially critical realism pieces. They agree on a mixture of the two and start the process of selection, humming along with the music from the radio and talking to each other about this and that in an unforced, natural way the Daughter wishes she could talk to the Mother in. Even just once. 

Because Clover knows and accepts who you are, whispers the garage. 

The Daughter pretends not to hear.  

One of the vernissage invitations has gone to Ray, the journalist who wrote the article about her. Like Clover, he's a semi-frequent visitor and owns another of her pictures, a small canvas of a black and white squirrel amongst an entire disco of bizarrely colored foliage. It hangs in his office and is the conversation piece of the newsroom. Almost our unofficial mascot, he tells her. Ray RSVPs immediately and says he'll bring his sister. She digs the squirrel, too, he says and then adds, and I'm single at the moment, anyway.....

The vernissage opens with a catered dinner party. Clover arrives first and wanders around the showroom scrutinizing and wringing her hands, straightening already straight pieces and nervously looking out the window as if it were her own show. 

The guests show up in twos, waving, smiling, some bearing small gifts. They follow Clover's example and study the artwork, stepping forward and backward, coming up close and moving further away, taking the occasional sip of wine.

Barb and Jim, probably her best customers with five of her canvases hanging in their house, are dressed like they're attending a wedding. Pierre and his partner Woody, the owners of an up-scale gift shop two towns away who graciously allow her to hang a few canvases in their shop on commission, are all smiles and kisses. Freda, the septuagenarian librarian who badgered the regional library until they purchased the Daughter's portrait of a mother reading to a child from a tattered storybook, arrives self-consciously patting her new blue-wash perm with one hand and the other clutching the elbow of her grand-nephew Gabriel, a pleasant young man who after a few minutes only has eyes for Clover. Ray arrives with a bouquet of white roses and his sister, Hannah, a black-haired thirty-something, who is carrying a bottle of champagne.

Half-way through the evening, looking up at the ceiling tiles and the large windows, Hannah suddenly turns to the Daughter and asks if she remembers a toy garage that was popular in the '70s.

Did you have one?, the Daughter answers, suddenly excited.

Hannah explodes in laughter so hard that the dimples in her cheeks become visible and something inside the Daughter that's been closed since Shelly unlatches and begins to swing open. 

No, I didn't. Our mom was forever trying to press bald-headed baby dolls and, God, I don't know, these little plastic horses on me. But he did, she points at Ray. He got everything he wanted.

Not everything, answers Ray and playfully slaps at his sister elbow, but looks at the Daughter when he says it.

I bet you did, though. Have one of those garages?

No, confesses the Daughter, but I always wanted one. And now... she gestures with open, helpless hands towards the walls.

You've got exactly what you wanted. Fantastic! finishes Hannah, and raises her glass in a toast. Absolutely fantastic!

The vernissage is a success.

Freda haggles far too good of a price for the picture of a young black man reading alone in a busy diner, but the Daughter is having too good of a time to put up much of a real fight. The rest of the guests follow the bidding as if they were watching a tennis final, cheering and applauding when the opponents finally reach an agreement and shake hands over the net. Gabriel leaves with Clover's telephone number in his pocket, the tops of his ears still pink from asking. Four paintings get small, yellow SOLD labels, including a study of a pattern of raindrops sliding down a glass pane that the Daughter is overly proud of.

But the biggest success is that Hannah comes back the next day. 

Without Ray.