Dani was already holding herself together with only sheer grit and lots of cheap coffee, but I pushed at her as gently as I could to see if I could break through her panic. “Public schools don’t require preschool. She’ll go to Aspen, same as the other kids, and I’m sure by the end of kindergarten you won’t see a difference in her preparation versus anyone else’s.”
“That’s the thing!” she burst out. “I already do. Haven’t you noticed how different Chloe is from other kids at the park?”
The anxiety in her voice startled me, but worse was the familiar stir of not-rightness that prickled my stomach whenever I watched Chloe play—or more like not play—with other kids. “I mean, she’s a little shy. And I know I’m not an expert, but I’d bet my entire pathetic bank account that she doesn’t have any developmental delays.”
“She has social ones,” Dani said, her voice quieter. “And the more I watch her, the more sure I am that they’re outside of normal. She needs a private program with a low teacher-to-student ratio so she can’t disappear.”
“I think state law limits how high the ratios can be, same as elementary classrooms,” I said, trying to calm her.
“But they can’t pay the teachers enough to guarantee they care like the private preschool academies can. And the private schools do have smaller teacher-student ratios. The other moms are always talking about that. I just need someone to see Chloe and love her and send her into kindergarten feeling confident. Otherwise I’m afraid she’ll . . .” She trailed off, and more tears fell.
“I think you’re not giving the public preschools enough credit. But if you really believe that, let me homeschool her. I’ll be the best private preschool teacher ever.”
“I love you,” Dani said, her smile watery. “But how does that overcome her social delays? She needs to learn how to be around other kids.”
She had me there. “I really think you’re stressing about this more than you need to, and that’s because you’re a good mom,” I hurried to add when her jaw hardened. “This? How worried you are? This is why you were made to be Chloe’s mom. It proves you’re doing the most important stuff right. Don’t stress. Stuff always has a way of working out.” And it would this time because I’d make it, for Chloe and Dani.
She gave me a watered-down smile. “Yeah. You. You’re the way it works out. You do too much, and I can’t thank you enough for it.”
“Shut up. You thank me too much. Go wash your face, try again with your mascara, and get out of here.”
This time her real smile showed up. “You want to lick your finger and rub at my smudges? Or maybe tuck my shirt in?”
“Fine. Ignore me. You look fantastic, and you shouldn’t change a thing.”
She pushed up from the table and checked her reflection in the microwave. “Holy cow. I’m going to go wash my face and fix my mascara.”
“Told you.”
She rolled her eyes but returned from the bathroom a few minutes later minus the tragic raccoon look. On the deck, she called for Chloe, wrapping her tiny daughter up in a long hug. Some days Chloe made it harder for her to leave than others, clinging to her and crying, but today was a brave day, and Chloe smoothed Dani’s hair back to kiss her on the cheek before wiggling loose in pursuit of her butterfly again.
Dani came back in and scooped up her purse and backpack. “She needs to go to bed on time tonight.”
“Of course.”
Her eyes narrowed. “I mean it. No Dora marathons.”
“But I love it so much.”
“You just like being Chloe’s favorite.”
“Guilty. Now get out of here.”
She smiled, another real one, and left.
I poked my head out the sliding door. “Chloe! Come in for a minute.” She veered toward me, still running, and I braced myself again and scooped her up. “Want to draw?”
“Piwates?” she asked, her eyes lighting up.
“You can draw pirates. I’m thinking about daffodils.”
“Those?” Chloe pointed to the planter, and I nodded. She let go of me and clapped. “Yes, Wia! Draw them!” She scrambled down to fetch her pile of scratch paper in her toy chest behind the sofa, then ran back out and thrust the crinkled sheets at me. “I get my colors.” And she ran off again.
I set the papers on her plastic easel, the closest I’d come to the real thing since New York. “Why don’t you work here, and I’ll use my own colors,” I said when she returned with a box of crayons.
That made her giggle again. “You not have any colors, silly Wia.”
“I got some Lia colors today. I’ll show you.”
“Okay,” she said, already more interested in putting a finer point on her pink crayon in the box’s sharpener. I retrieved my supplies and sat down to work, capturing the lines of the daffodils in a few easy pencil strokes. I’d sketched so many things for Chloe that it was easy to translate the flowers into graphite, but for the first time in a long time, I wanted to give them more life and color.
Chloe showed me a pink scribble with a green line poking out of it.
“Beautiful flower, sweet pea. What do you think of mine?”
Chloe’s eyes widened. “Bootiful. Color it,” she said, plucking the yellow crayon from her box, which made me laugh.
I held the sketch away and studied it. “Maybe I should use these,” I said, showing her the watercolors.
Chloe stared at the tubes behind the plastic window. “That not crayons.”
“No, those are paint.”
Chloe wiggled her fingers. “Paint!”
I hugged her because I couldn’t resist squeezing the cuteness. “Not fingerpaint. Watch this.”
I laid down a piece of watercolor paper on the tabletop, opened the cap on the yellow cadmium, and squirted it onto a plastic plate, then picked up an inexpensive synthetic brush and swirled it through the yellow, mixing it with water, loving the resistance as the paint slowed it down. Chloe watched in silence, and I drew a deep breath before touching my brush to the paper. The yellow blossomed on the page, and with a couple of quick strokes, the petals of the daffodil appeared.
“Wia,” Chloe breathed. “Dat like magic.”
The place that had cracked open inside me when I’d first imagined the daffodil painting widened even further, this time like a full-body stretch on the inside. It was like magic. The chest fist had disappeared with the flick of a paintbrush.
I pressed my forehead against Chloe’s. “Would you like me to finish this?”
“Yes, pwease.”
I pressed a kiss against her brow. “Then I will. What will you work on?”
“I make flowers too. Outside!” She raced back to her easel and dragged it toward the door.
I loved her determination and gave her a hand with the other side, helping her carry it out and set it up in the late-afternoon sunshine. She plopped herself down with her yellow crayon in hand and attempted a careful, crooked petal.
It took a few minutes to get my own paper set up properly on a thick piece of cardboard at the patio table before I could focus on capturing the way the light played on the stem differently than the blossom itself. Peace washed over me. It would be worth a hundred extra shifts to buy more supplies and chase that feeling.
I had no idea how long I’d worked when I heard the neighbor’s sliding door open. Chloe had wandered out to the grass at the edge of the deck to weave a daisy chain when Griff stepped out and waved. “Ladies. Always good to see you out here.”
“Also good to get the weather that lets us be out here,” I said. I was proud it came out louder than a mumble. That was progress.
“Yeah. Too bad about all the sunshine,” he said, making me grin. Griff was happiest if the clouds were hinting at snow conditions. He always skied until the last possible day of the season, and days on the slopes were numbered.
“What are you ladies up to?” he asked, surveying our deck.
“Hi, Gwiff,” Chloe said, her voice soft. She kept her eyes on her
daisies.
“Sweet pea,” Griff said, his voice a gentle invitation for her to look. He’d been doing that for a while now. At first it had bugged me that he borrowed my nickname for Chloe, but when it had actually gotten him past her debilitating shyness enough for her to talk to him, I forgave him for the theft.
He leaned across his railing and peered at Chloe’s easel. “Did you draw your flowers?” he asked. “That’s really good.”
“Thank you,” Chloe said, her expression proud. “Mine is as pretty as Wia’s.” She ducked her head again.
“You’re drawing too?” he asked me, his eyebrows lifting.
My cheeks heated. I wished I could mix up some ochre to cover the red creeping across them. The other colors I would need flashed through my head: aureolin yellow, alizarin crimson, cobalt blue. “Kind of. I’m painting.”
“Can I see?”
I hesitated. I’d never been shy about my work before, but I hadn’t worked in watercolor to mastery the way I had in oils. I could see all the flaws in the daffodils I’d committed to the paper, but I could also see how to fix them. The objective part of my brain that had been one of my greatest assets as a critic of my own work told me I had nothing to be embarrassed about. Still, I hesitated. I couldn’t decide if showing my first work in years to a casual acquaintance like my neighbor was a good or bad way to start. When the pause after his question had grown awkward to the point that he looked as if I would need to paint the growing pink out of his cheeks too, I cleared my throat with a mumbled apology and stepped out of the way so he could see.
He pushed his sandy blond bangs out of his eyes and squinted, their startling light green appearing even brighter against his skin. He always looked sun-fresh thanks to the time he spent on the slopes, and even though it had deepened the lines around his eyes, I liked the character it gave his otherwise boyish face. I couldn’t believe a dozen women hadn’t already tried to snatch him up. Or maybe they had. I’d seen a date or two of his drop by over the last two years but never more than once. Someone would wise up and drag him to the altar eventually.
Griff studied the picture for a long, quiet minute. “How come I didn’t know you could do this?” he finally asked, his voice tinged with awe. “Because that’s not the first time you’ve ever painted flowers.”
“I haven’t done it in a long time.”
“It’s so good it’s hard to believe you haven’t been locked away in your condo doing this all day, every day.”
I surprised myself by telling him more of the truth than I’d given anyone since I left New York. “I used to.” I left it at that, and Griff let it drop, which is one of the things I liked about him.
“I feel inadequate soaking up all the talent out here like a freeloader. Chloe, I’m no good at painting. Is there anything I can do that would make me part of the club?”
“What a talent?” Chloe asked, her brow furrowed.
“Something you’re good at,” I said. “What could Griff do for a talent while we draw?”
“Music,” Chloe whispered. “Guitar.”
“Do you think that would work?” Griff asked, his face serious. “I want to do my part to belong.”
Chloe nodded, the third victim of blushing cheeks.
Griff nodded. “If you’re sure, then I’ll be right back.” He disappeared into his house and emerged a couple minutes later with his guitar. He took a seat, propping his feet up on the rail while he picked out the opening strains of a Spanish piece that immediately made my hips want to twitch. Instead, I picked up my paint and considered how to approach the stem. I squeezed the green tube and laughed at myself. Had I really thought a handful of paints would be enough? It had never been enough before, and at the same moment my head released the painting inside it, and it flowed out through my fingertips, the creeping frustration of not having everything I needed to make it exactly what I saw tried to crowd it out. I needed a deeper green, and it would take mixing in its opposite, a red I didn’t have, to give me the right shade.
I’d go back to McGill’s tomorrow to get some other colors.
The thought stopped me cold, the crescendo of the song swelling under Griff’s skillful playing with a reality that broke me out of my painting high.
There wasn’t money for this. There wasn’t money for this any more than there was money for a dozen other things looming, and all of them, until an hour ago, had mattered more than watercolor supplies.
I set the brush down and stared out past the top of the fence to the Salt Lake valley spread out below. Maybe it was time to sell this place. The market was decent. We could move into an apartment with rent cheaper than my mortgage, and maybe the difference would be enough to pay for the preschool Dani wanted. And something simple like paint wouldn’t feel so far out of reach.
Once the idea took root, I couldn’t shake it. It would tick Dani off if I interfered, but too bad. I watched Chloe bent over her newest drawing, with her tongue sticking out as she concentrated on trying to make a petal. That girl was my heart, and I hated the idea of her sitting in some overcrowded preschool in a crumbly building downtown while Dani tried to make her life work. And I hated even more the stress carving lines around my sister’s mouth far too early. She was younger than me. She shouldn’t already be carrying the weight of the world on her shoulders, but she was. It was the weight of Chloe’s world, and I could maybe do something about that.
“I’ll be back in a second,” I told Griff and slipped into the house to retrieve my laptop from my room, then returned and went on a Google hunt with his guitar as my sound track, something more bluegrass now. I pulled up all the preschools in town to see if I could figure out which ones Dani was thinking of. All of them looked like places I’d quit adulthood to play in for a few hours a day, but I guessed that was standard for a community where poverty was a foreign concept. After six years in New York, I missed the diversity like an ache, but there was no denying that sticking well-to-do people all in one place produced some high-caliber schools.
I descended into the world of local mommy bloggers, and in between braiding tutorials and a million soft-focus pictures of darling kids in hand-knit beanies, the same name kept coming up: the Bethwell Academy. Thirty minutes later, I had an appointment to check it out in two days. I wouldn’t tell Dani because the director was clear over the phone that they had no openings for fall, but I had a plan. If it worked, I’d tell Dani, but I didn’t want to let her down if I failed. But I wouldn’t. I watched Chloe’s blonde head bobbing in time to Griff’s music. I couldn’t fail.
Griff had drifted into something more folksy. That was one of my favorite things about listening to him play, that he never stayed in a box. I scraped together some courage and tried small talk. “Griff?”
“Hm?”
“Do you ever play at Leifson’s?” That was the restaurant he managed at the Snowtop Lodge. I’d never been there because the filet mignon prices way outstripped my hamburger budget. But maybe someday I’d go. I’d taken for granted all the upscale restaurants and fine dining during my marriage to Donovan. It was literally the only thing I missed.
At first, the whole concept of wealth had fascinated me. Donovan had taken me to parties in homes luxurious beyond anything imaginable and paid for dinners that cost more than my groceries for a month. It had been intoxicating, and he’d done it all without thinking about it, like it was no big deal. And it never was—for someone who’d come from money.
Somewhere, something had gone wrong though. We’d dated for a year and married. I had to strike a compromise with his mother to get a low-key wedding, but in return, she threw us an elaborate reception. The first year after that had been good. But work got hard for Donovan, and he came home tense and frustrated more and more often.
The tension it introduced into our comfortable Tribeca apartment made it hard to paint, and most times when I tried to pick up a brush, I pictured disinterested friends of the Beckmans checking the paintings out for size and writing thoughtless
checks to purchase them. So I painted less.
Donovan freaked out when my work trailed off, and that broke the thing between us that had already begun to crumble. I tried for a few more months to get him to talk to me; I got us a counselor—I tried everything to pull us out of the spiral we’d dived into. None of it worked.
I finally told him I was going on a retreat with a teacher from art school who had invited a handful of her students to join her for a month on Martha’s Vineyard. It would cost about two thousand for the month to cover all travel, board, and food expenses, but when I tried to send the money, my payment was declined for lack of funds.
That’s how I discovered Donovan had stolen several hundred thousand dollars from me, and there was nothing left. He’d been fired from his job as an investment banker six months before, and he’d been using my money to support his lifestyle and keep up appearances.
It was a huge web of lies. He’d been leaving our apartment every day but not going to work. He’d blown a huge chunk of the money he’d stolen on illegal prescription painkillers—an addiction that had led to his termination in the first place. And by the time it had all shaken out, I’d left New York with a check from his parents to pay for my silence, and I’d had no desire to ever look back.
Griff’s mellow voice returned me to the present. “Leifson’s isn’t a live-music kind of place,” he said, but the tiny upturn of his lips said he was pleased that I thought he should play there.
“I’d think anywhere is a live-music kind of place if the music is good like yours.” Ooooh, bold.
He patted the guitar. “This is just for fun. Just for me.”
“And us,” Chloe said, looking up from her painting. She’d moved on to butterflies. Happiness spread through me like it did every time I saw the evidence that she’d gotten the same art gene I had. She made some pretty amazing stuff for a three-year-old.
Painting Kisses Page 3