Where the River Ends - Charles Martin [28]
She seemed intrigued. “How so?”
“Take a long look at it.” She did. “Now close your eyes.” She looked at me. “Just close them.” She folded her arms and closed her eyes. “Now, tell me what you see.”
She opened her eyes. “His face.”
“Exactly. Except you can’t see it by looking at that photo.” I walked to the wall and slid a large canvas out from behind another. I had filled most of the canvas with the Babe’s face.
“Wow.” She studied it a minute. “Have you shown that to your professors?” I shook my head. “You should.”
I slid it back into its place. “I’m…well, I do faces. At least I’m trying.”
She stared at me. She didn’t want to leave. “Why?”
I folded my arms and shrugged. “Because of what they say without ever uttering a word.”
She nodded. “I’d better get back. He’s probably worried. Flew all this way and I’m not even home.”
“Who’s he?”
“Daddy.” She checked her watch. “About seven, then?”
I glanced at my watchless arm and said, “Sure. When the freckle gets past the hair.”
She laughed. “Thanks for the tea.”
“Yeah…there’s always more. And if not, I know where I can steal some.”
She pulled the baseball cap down over her eyes. Her tone when she spoke was quiet and soft. “And…for last night.”
I set down my tea. “Anybody would have done the same thing.”
“Yeah?” She shook her head and pointed over one shoulder. “One man with binoculars was watching us through a window. Another, a jogger, crossed the park and pretended not to see.”
“How’d you see them?”
“It was hard not to. I was on my back.”
I shoved my hands in my pockets, trying to look like James Dean. “Well, next time, pick somebody bigger. Make it a challenge.”
“Do you always make jokes when someone else is trying to be serious?”
Long pause. “I rented this place eight months ago with the hopes that the storefront would allow me to sell my work.” I waved my hand across the room. “I’ve yet to sell the first piece. Making jokes helps me…in truth, it’s the curtain I hide behind so folks like you won’t see that the emperor’s food taster has no clothes.”
She bit her lip. “From what folks are saying, you don’t wear them much anyway.”
“Yeah, it’s a new marketing campaign to get people to the window.”
“Too bad you can’t keep them there.”
“Ooh…that cuts deep.”
She walked across the room, grabbed Miss Rachel and placed her in the window. “Each piece should have a name. It’ll help people identify with them. Buyers, that is.” She thought a minute and pointed at Miss Rachel. “Contentment.” She looked at me. “Because she is.”
She untied the dusty $300 price tag off an existing piece and hung it over the corner of Miss Rachel’s canvas. Then she carefully placed a 1 in front of the 3 and stood back, chewing on a fingernail. She tilted her head, considered it a moment, then wrote over the 3, creating an 8 in its place. She stood back. “Folks around here like to feel they are buying something of value. If you don’t value your work, why should they? In New York, this would be a bargain, and”—she waved her hand across the shoppers milling along the streets—“that’s where most of these folks shop when they’re not”—she shaded her eyes with her hand—“fogging up your window.”
She tugged on the bill of her baseball cap and disappeared around the corner. She had yet to tell me her name.
8
JUNE 1
I steadied the boat and began paddling just as a muted voice rose up from beneath the tarp: “Hey, good looking.” I leaned in. “You have done this before, right?”
“Once or twice.”
She shifted to one side. “That sounded like it went well.”
She was smiling beneath the adrenaline rush brought on by the combination of fentanyl and Actiq. I knelt, sweat dripping off my face and nose. “Yeah, well, I never really liked Charleston anyway.”
She rolled her eyes closed, then open.
“We can still turn back.”
She shook her head. Her tongue was thick. “I’m with you.”
I felt her feet, which, despite the seventy-five-degree heat, were cold and clammy. “How you feeling?”
She shifted uneasily. “Never better.”
“Headache?”
She nodded and tried to smile. When