I shook my head, realizing it might be Tara and feeling stupid for not remembering that in the first place. But the caller ID said it was Bethwell. Had Chloe made it in?
“Hello, Ms. Carswell. I have good news for you,” Dr. Bray said when I answered. I worried that I wouldn’t hear her over the sound of the blood pounding through my temples. “We have a spot for Chloe this fall.”
My heart gave a single hard thump, and I closed my eyes and mouthed a thank you to the garage roof, hoping the words would make it up and out to whichever angel had pulled that string for us. “Thank you.” The words were too insubstantial to hold the weight of my gratitude, but I meant them with every one of my atoms.
“You’re welcome. We look forward to having you on the faculty. I had no doubt our board would be thrilled with the arrangement.”
Everything inside of me sang. I almost wished it was Christmas so I could wrap up the news with a giant bow for Dani to open while I shouted, “Ta da! It’s your dream come true!”
I hung up with Dr. Bray and pressed Dani’s number so fast my hand slipped and I had to try again.
“Everything okay?” she asked, answering immediately and without a hello.
“Everything is awesome,” I answered. “Chloe’s at Avalon’s, but I got a call I think you should know about. It was Bethwell. They have a spot for Chloe!” Total silence met that. “Dani?” I asked, my heart pounding again but not with excitement this time. Had I misunderstood how much she wanted Chloe to go there?
I heard a hiccup, and I couldn’t decipher it. Was she crying? When she spoke, her voice sounded flat, but there were no tears in it. “This is going to cost you too much, and I hate myself that I’m still going to say yes,” she said.
My heart calmed down. “It’s not going to cost me. The paintings are going well. This is going to be better than fine.”
“I wasn’t thinking about the dollar amount,” she said. “When word gets out that you’re producing work again, won’t it change everything for you in a way that’s going to, I don’t know, wring you out?”
“I love you for thinking of that. I do. But this commission is the last thing I’m ever going to do as Leandra Tate, so it doesn’t matter. If Victoria can’t take no for an answer, I won’t take Victoria’s calls.” I slumped against the wall, relief that Dani was going to let Chloe go to Bethwell flooding through me. “I’ll tell you a secret if you don’t tell anyone else: I’m kind of happy with painting. There are still some scary days, but there have been some mind-blowingly good ones too. I’m coming at this from a different place. I’m going to be okay.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. So, Bethwell?”
There was a long silence and then a shriek. “Yes, yes, yes! Thank you so much! Chloe is going to die when you tell her. She hasn’t stopped talking about it.”
I grinned at the delighted stream of words. “You’re welcome, and you tell her.”
“But this is only happening because—”
“Because you had the good sense to recognize a great school when you heard about it. Tell her, or she’ll never know. Got it? It should come from you.”
“Thank you,” she said again, her voice soft. “Seriously. I owe you.”
“No. You guys saved me. I’m starting to get even, that’s all.”
We hung up, and I switched out my canvas for a blank one, leaning the one in progress carefully against a wall so I could come back to it—so far, it was the beginnings of joy, but full joy still needed some work before it shone from the painting.
I let my brush fly over the new canvas for a while, and my insides stretched again as I painted what it looked like to run one of my favorite trails and let every care fall away. An hour later, I stood back to study it and couldn’t decide which one I liked better.
The whine of Griff’s garage door opening lured me outside for a break. He backed out and stopped when he saw me waving at him, and he lowered his window to smile. “Hey, Picasso.”
“More like Matisse, but hey back,” I said. “I need to tell you something. It’s important.”
His smile faded for a more serious expression. “Sure,” he said, and subtle tension stiffened his shoulders. I admired that he stayed put.
“Dani’s most favorite thing in the whole world is those waxy chocolate-covered donuts and Veronica Mars reruns. Use that information for good, Griff.”
Confusion crinkled his forehead for a minute, and then it smoothed out. “You’re a good egg.”
“Yes.”
He grinned and backed the rest of the way onto the road, offering a good-bye wave as he drove off. I had no idea if I’d done a good thing or not, but it had felt right, and every hour I spent in my studio confirmed my instincts. I wouldn’t second-guess myself on this. Instead, I ducked into the kitchen for a banana and went right back out to my work. It was better than food, anyway.
Chapter 20
It had been a long time since I’d spent so many days on a high like this, but like real drugs, the crash had to follow. It was Tom’s fault this time. I’d ignored messages from Aidan, who had given up after two days. I’d ignored messages from Victoria, who had called every morning and would probably continue for infinity. And I’d ignored two messages from my boss already.
If I could have turned my phone off, I would have, but I couldn’t leave Dani without a way to get in touch with me, and that meant putting up with everyone else begging for my attention too. It was Tom’s text with a 911 and a panicked emoticon that finally got me to call him back, even though I wasn’t due to pick up any shifts until the next week. If Tom was desperate enough to use emoticons, it was bad.
“I need you to come in,” he said.
“Can’t. I’m in a groove.” I wished there were a better way to explain it, but I couldn’t find the words. The hours I’d spent in my garage over the last week had produced almost a dozen canvases, all of them good. Two of them might have even been great, including the one of my trail run. But there wasn’t a way to put it into words beyond groove to explain the impossibility of leaving the creative space to wipe down tables for a morning. I didn’t mind the work—never had—but I couldn’t stop painting now to do it.
“Good for you, but I’m in the opposite of a groove. Chaos, maybe. Charlene’s girl caught something bad, meningitis, and Caden busted his ankle mountain biking on Tuesday. You gotta come in.”
My stomach clenched. “Is Charlene okay?”
“I don’t know; I barely got the call. Couldn’t figure out why she hadn’t shown up, but that’s a good reason. What Charlene does is going to depend on how her girl does. They think they caught the meningitis early enough, but it’s going to be a couple days before either of them is in any kind of decent shape. In the meantime, I need you.”
I glanced over at the painting I was working on. I knew from past experience that there was no telling for sure when a creative streak like this would end, when the filter that sometimes stood between my mind’s eye and the canvas would reappear and dam the flood pouring out of me. And there was no telling when that happened how long it would be before I found flow again. It was a sure bet that going in to work wouldn’t help.
Tom’s voice broke a silence I hadn’t realized had fallen. “I know you’re doing good with your painting, but there was a time when you needed this place way more than I needed you, and I took you in. Now it’s—”
“It’s okay,” I said, not wanting him even for two seconds to feel like he had to beg. I knew the right thing to do. “I’ll come in. I don’t know how much of my brain will come with me, but I’ll work my tail off until Charlene’s up to it again. But I won’t cover for Caden. He’s a chump, and you’re going to have to hire someone to replace him until he can work again.”
“Fair enough,” Tom said, and the relief in his voice was so palpable that a knot of guilt lodged in my stomach at the notion that he’d worried even for a second that I wouldn’t help. “I have one of the evening girls covering today, but
I’ll need you tomorrow.”
“I’ll be there.” We hung up, and I turned to face my paintings. In a single phone call, my time had become infinitely more precious. I had three days to submit my work, and I’d lost the luxury of playing with ideas. Maybe that was okay. I already knew which two needed to be finished, and I swapped the first of them out for the one on the easel. It was good. As good as anything I’d ever done, even on this smaller scale. But I had to make it better, and there was a hard stop to the time I could spend doing it. I pulled out the right oil colors and set them in easy reach. Then I disappeared into the painting one last time.
* * *
“I’ve never been so glad to see anyone in my life,” Tom grumbled when I walked into the kitchen the next morning. It was still pre-sunrise gray outside, but the familiar diner smells had woken me up as soon as I stepped through the door.
“Stop it. You’re going to give me a big head.”
“Doubt it. Don’t get me wrong. I’m in a take-what-I-can-get mode, help-wise, but out of curiosity, did your brain come in today?”
“Wish I could promise, but I’m itchy to get back to my studio. Can we leave it at ‘I’ll do my best?’” The front door swung open to admit a new customer, and I scooped up the coffeepot. “So it begins.”
We didn’t talk about anything except the steady stream of orders coming in until Mr. Benny, who had eyed me as if my presence were a personal insult to him, climbed off his stool to leave for whichever destination he liked to drive people crazy at next. I bet he sat in the public library and heckled people’s book choices for amusement.
“You been jumpy,” Tom noted when the door closed behind Mr. Benny.
It was getting worse as the morning wore on. “Yeah. Sorry.”
“He’ll come in.”
I stopped and peered at him. “Who?”
“He’s been in every morning.”
“Asking for me?”
“No. But I’m expecting him to break down any day now and ask if you quit or went on vacation.”
“Thanks for the heads-up.” In a weird way, Aidan was the reason I’d been able to pay attention to my diner work. Instead of wandering back to my paintings, my senses had been tuned to warn me if he walked in. Every time the door opened, I’d freeze for a tiny fraction before turning to see who it was, knowing even before I did that it wouldn’t be him because I hadn’t sensed a change in the air. I grabbed a rag and headed out to do some side work while we waited for the early lunch crowd and distracted myself by trying to think of a word for the shift in the molecules that happened when he showed up. It was like the air thickened the way it did between two magnets when they sensed each other but you held them apart at that point where they wanted to pull toward each other.
I’d filled in the sweeteners on the next-to-last table when the door opened and the air changed. I looked up, glad I’d had that fraction of a second to compose my face. “Hi,” I said. My voice wanted to come out as cold or awkward, but I kept it as neutral as my face. I didn’t want him to read anything in it—not frustration or relief or annoyance.
He hovered inside of the door, a coil of energy. Usually he was relaxed, as if he were on the verge of stretching out and sinking into a Times article or clasping his hands behind his head to take in a view. Now he looked caught between moments, a hesitancy I’d never seen in him before. Instead of saying anything, he turned and walked back out.
I looked over my shoulder to see if Tom had noticed. His eyebrows arched. He’d missed nothing. He shook his head and looked back down at the grill; the scrape of steel against steel rang as he cleaned it for Aidan’s order. Business as usual. Good plan.
I looked down at the tin of sweeteners in my hand. It was full, and it was the next-to-last one I had to tend to. I dumped them out and replaced them, putting each one with its corner slightly higher than the one before it so it created a pretty sunburst shape fanning out from the top. With each packet I replaced, I came up with a theory to explain Aidan’s sudden retreat. One. He only wanted to be here if I wasn’t. Two. He forgot I worked here. By number twelve (he’d misremembered my attractiveness and decided to run before he got caught), the door opened and he stood there again, this time carrying a brown package tied with twine.
Chapter 21
“I guess I’ve known it was you,” I said, taking it from him. Seeing him with the package made me realize I’d known it for a while at some level.
“Is that a good or a bad thing?”
Both. You’re so thoughtful, and you’re also so many things I don’t want you to be. I ignored his question and asked one of my own. “How did you get the food to my house?”
“I had someone pay Caden fifty bucks to look up your address and drop it off.”
Tom growled. I wasn’t sure Caden would be coming back to work ever now.
“Why did you do all this as a secret?” I asked the second-most-burning question I’d had about these packages after “Who?” It’s not like he’d made his interest in me a secret at any point.
“I wanted to do something nice for you,” he said. “I didn’t think you’d let me.”
“I’m not opposed to people doing nice things for me,” I said, rubbing my hand over the brown paper. Whatever it was inside was light and cool to the touch.
“Yes, she is,” Tom said.
I turned around and glared at him.
Aidan held up his hands. “Maybe you are, and maybe you aren’t, but I figured for sure if you knew this stuff was coming from me, you’d think it was a gimmick or something. It’s not. I wanted to, that’s all.” He smiled, but it showed strain, and I wondered if that was my fault. “I don’t know what happened the other night. I’ve replayed it, and I don’t think I did or said anything out of line. But the way you took off out of there, I worried that I had . . .” He swallowed like the next words pained him to say them. “I worried that I had scared you somehow, and I wanted to say I was sorry.”
I opened my mouth to reassure him that he hadn’t scared me, at least not in the way he meant, but he held up his hand. “Let me finish, please. I realize if I really did scare you that coming in here in person might only make it worse, but I had to see for myself that you’re okay, especially after you didn’t show up for a bunch of days.”
“You didn’t scare me,” I said. Not physically.
“Okay.” Some of the worry left his eyes.
I shifted the package between my hands. “Couldn’t you have snapped your fingers and sent a minion to check on me or something?” I didn’t know if I meant it as a joke or an accusation.
He paused like he was trying to find the right answer. “I do the important jobs myself.”
Wow. Yeah, that was the right answer.
The door opened to admit a couple of young guys who looked like they needed Tom’s Hangover Cure, a protein-packed omelet favored by some of the partiers who came to play in the canyons. I frowned at them and then gave Aidan an apologetic look. “I’d better take care of them. I’ll bring some coffee to your table in a minute.”
He shook his head. “It’s probably hard to believe, but it’s never been my thing to stay where I’m not wanted. I don’t want to stress you out. I only came to give you that and apologize,” he said, nodding at the package. “Stick it in the fridge if you don’t open it soon. Felt like I owed you for cheating you out of real dessert with store-bought ice cream. See you around, Lia.” He shoved his hands in his pockets and walked out. I watched until his truck disappeared, but one of the hungover boys clinked his silverware, and I snapped out of it.
Tom eyed me when I set the package in the fridge. “You’re not going to open that?”
“Customers,” I said, reaching for the coffee.
“Those boneheads will wait. See what he got you.”
He didn’t need to tell me twice. I undid the paper to reveal an amazing-looking piece of tiramisu from Rosetti’s. A note in strong black handwriting stuck to the top. “I don’t understand you at all,
but I finally see you don’t want to be figured out. It shouldn’t have taken so long. Sorry.”
Was this fresh? Did he stop in at Rosetti’s every day to bring me a piece until I came back? He would have had to.
I tucked the twine in my pocket, and my hand brushed against it every time I fished my order pad out for the rest of my shift. Every time I touched it, the rough texture chafed at more than my skin. It irritated my conscience too. Aidan’s gifts hadn’t been wildly extravagant compared to what he could have afforded. But he’d chosen simple things that reflected what he knew about me the best he could. I’d commented on daffodils and gotten a book about wildflowers. He’d seen me painting and sent me higher quality brushes. I’d complimented his sandwich and gotten gourmet food.
And I’d glanced at a tray longingly and gotten tiramisu.
If he’d come in with a whiff of alpha male on him, I would have shut him down faster than Tom could flip a hotcake. If Aidan had brought me anything flashy, I’d have followed him out and handed it back.
But he’d brought me dessert because he thought he’d shortchanged me. This was the gesture of an apologetic man, not one still trying to score points. I slid the tiramisu into the restaurant fridge and got the boys their coffee, but I did it all mechanically while my brain looped a single question: How wrong had I been about Aidan? And should I be relieved or worried about the undertone of good-bye in his note?
* * *
I often came home from Tom’s too tired to do more than plop down beside Chloe for an episode of My Little Pony while I recharged enough to chase her until bedtime. Today I rolled into the house on a wave of restless energy. Dani was still in sweats, which meant she didn’t need to leave for a while.
“Do I have time for a run before you take off?” I asked.
“Sure. Want some before you go? You can eat and burn it off.” She held out a bag of chocolate Donettes, and I grinned.
“The donut fairy bring those?”
Painting Kisses Page 19